["National Velvet"] is a book that is rich with life that has been lived amply and with gracious easiness and that has eventually spilled over irresistibly into art. You may speak of it as escape literature if you like, for it in no way impinges on the problems that are tearing the heart of today's humanity; but it will be more fittingly thought of as a reminder of those eternal human amenities that invariably survive political and social cataclysms….

The book abounds in wit and in scores of passages that the reviewer would have liked to include here for their startling appositeness. There are delectably funny bits, like that midnight scene when the mountainous Araminty "rose like a sea monster from its home," battling furiously for her daughter's dream. There is Don, the 4-year-old, as dirty, exasperating and natural a brat as ever got onto paper. It is...