Friendship Village

We take up Friendship Village, by Zona Gale, and we wonder how Miss Gale could have thought of the things set down therein if they had not been really true! There must be a Friendship Village, otherwise it could never have been thus described. And we are glad there is, for it renews our faith in human nature and our courage and our human brotherliness to believe that Friendship Village does somewhere exist. And how we should like to go there! We should like to talk with Calliope, that uniquely clever and quaintly sensible and shyly romantic and above all big-hearted woman. And we should like to know the Proudfits -- now that we understand them -- who were ever "buyin' and livin' on the outside, judicious and refined and right about everything"; and Miss-Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss who had "got hold o' some kind of a. Persian book, in a decorated cover, from the city, an' now she says your soul is like when you look in a lookin'-glass -- there ain't really nothin' there." But Calliope said: "Some mornin's when I wake up with the sun shinin' in, I can feel my soul in me just as plain as plain." And we should like to meet the little Timothy Toplady whose biggest oath was "Blistering Benson." We should like, indeed. to sit down among them all and talk over the affairs of the Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality and other important matters of the village; that is the way the book makes one feel. But we cannot tell what kind of a book it is. It is the kind of book that is the despair of the reviewer. It is like a personality: only by personal touch with it can one know it. Therefore the baffled but delighted reviewer is compelled to fall back upon a simple recommendation, and that we joyoust make-to the grandmother by the fireside, the tired father and the mother, the girl and the boy; to everybody, read it, O do!

--The Christian Advocate, Volume 84