I can't help feeling that ISABEL ECCLESTONE MACKAY'S chief aim in _Up the Hill and Over_ (HURST AND BLAOKETT) was to write a convincing tract for the times on a subject which is achieving unhappy prominence in America as in our own police-courts. A worthy aim, I doubt not. One of the chief characters is a drug-taker; and as if that were not enough another is "out of her head," while a third, _Dr. Callandar_, the Montreal specialist, is in the throes of a nervous breakdown. This seems to me to be distinctly overdoing it. It is the doctor's love-story (a story so complicated that I cannot attempt a _précis_) which is the designedly central but actually subordinate theme. I have the absurd idea that this might really have begun life as a pathological thesis and suffered conversion into a novel. The author has no conscience in the matter of the employment of the much-abused device of coincidence. And I don't think the story would cure anyone of drug-taking. On the contrary. * * * * * _The Three Black Pennys_ (HEINEMANN) is a story that began by perplexing and ended by making a complete conquest of me. Its author, Mr. JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER, is, I think, new to this side of the Atlantic; the publishers tell me (and, to prevent any natural misapprehension, I pass on the information at once) that he belongs to "a Pennsylvania Dutch family, settled for many generations in Philadelphia." Which being so, one can enjoy his work with a free conscience. It certainly seems to me very unusual in quality. The theme of the tale is the history of the _Penny_ family, or rather of the periodical outcrop in it of a certain strain that produces _Pennys_ dark of countenance and incalculable of conduct. This recurrence is shown in three examples: the first, _Howart Penny_, in the days when men wore powder and the _Penny_ forge had just been started in what was then a British colony; the next, _Jasper_, involved in a murder trial in the sixties; and; last of the black _Pennys_, another _Howart_, in whom the family energy has thinned to a dilettante appreciation of the arts, dying alone amongst his collections. You can see from this outline that the book is incidentally liable to confound the skipper, who may find himself confronted with (apparently) the same character tying a periwig on one page and hiring a taxi on another. I am mistaken though if you will feel inclined to skip a single page of a novel at once so original and well-told. As a detail of criticism I had the feeling that the "blackness" of the _Penny_ exceptions would have shown up better had we seen more of the family in its ordinary rule; but of the power behind Mr. HERGESHEIMER'S work there can be no question. He is, I am sure, an artist upon a quite unusual scale, from whom great things may be anticipated. * * * * *