出版社周刊评论

First published in 1932, Keane's work offers a fond glimpse of that period's Anglo-Irish horse set, for whom there was no person finer than a true sportsman and no one lower than the scoundrel who would ``draw another man's coverts.'' Seven related episodes find the narrator, Englishman Oliver Pulleyns, in Ireland as the guest of his cousins Sir Richard Pulleyns and his children, Willow and Dick. In one tale, Oliver earns the esteem of his emotionally distant younger relatives when his swift action saves a point-to-point race win for Dick's horse. Oliver gets his own shot at a point-to-point course when cousins Honor and Beauty draft him to ride a horse about which they are highly mysterious. Later, Dick and Willow's mutual devotion is tested when Dick becomes infatuated with a young woman who is ``insufferably sporting'' even by Pulleyns standards. Only readers who can plunge into stories about ``horses past, present and to come'' will enjoy Keane's shrewd yet sympathetic depiction of a social scene that is, ultimately, as much of a dead end as the intensely close relationship of siblings Dick and Willow. Under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell, Keane wrote The Rising Tide . (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved