I find, on referring to the "By the same Author" page of _The Lad With Wings_ (Hutchinson), that other reviewers of "Berta Buck's" novels have been struck by the "charm" of her work. I should like to be original, but I cannot think of any better way of summing up the quality of her writing. Charm above everything else is what _The Lad With Wings_ possesses. It is a perfectly delightful book, moving at racing speed from the first chapter to the last, and so skilfully written that even the technically unhappy ending brings no gloom. When _Gwenna Williams_ and _Paul Dampier_, the young airman she has married only a few hours before the breaking out of war, go down to death together in mid-Channel after the battle with the German Taube, the reader feels with _Leslie Long, Gwenna's_ friend, "The best time to go out! No growing old and growing dull.... No growing out of love with each other, ever! They at least have had something that nothing can spoil." I suppose that when Mrs. Oliver Onions is interviewed as to her literary methods it will turn out that she re-writes everything a dozen times and considers fifteen hundred words a good day's work; but she manages in _The Lad With Wings_ to convey an impression of having written the whole story at a sitting. The pace never flags for a moment, and the characters are drawn with that apparently effortless skill which generally involves anguish and the burning of the midnight oil. I think I enjoyed the art of the writing almost as much as the story itself. If you want to see how a sense of touch can make all the difference, you should study carefully the character of _Leslie_, a genuine creation. But the book would be worth reading if only for the pleasure of meeting _Hugo Swayne_, the intellectual _dilettante_ who, when he tried to enlist, was rejected as not sufficiently intelligent and then set to painting omnibuses in the Futurist mode, to render them invisible at a distance. A few weeks from now I shall take down _The Lad With Wings_ from its shelf and read it all over again. It is that sort of book. * * * * *