SOURCE: A review of Roll River, in Forum and Century, Vol. 94, 1935, pp. IV.

In the following review, Walton describes Roll River as “warm with life, amply detailed, and singularly moving.”

A fine, grave, leisurely novel, Roll River covers fifty years in the life of a prosperous American family which lives in a small Pennsylvania city. On the point of death, Tom Rand looks back over his own past and that of his immediate forebears and discovers that the rigid, frozen ideas of a narrow social world have been responsible for their unhappiness. His beautiful, intelligent Aunt Clara had seen her marriage end in catastrophe because of her enforced ignorance and prudery. Tom himself had married a wan, frigid woman, blightingly respectable, and had not discovered the gravity of his mistake until after he returned from the War. Mr. Boyd has been especially successful with the romantic story of...