SOURCE: Review of The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs, in The Literary World, Vol. XX, No. 8, April 13, 1889, p. 123.

In the following review, the anonymous critic offers a favorable assessment of Levy's novels The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs.

The critic who takes up a new novel, by a new and unknown writer, in these days when the number of novels is legion, may be forgiven if he does not look forward to much pleasure from its perusal. There is such a painful amount of "meritorious mediocrity" in print today that there are nine chances out of ten against the new novel being worth reading. But this wearisome sameness, this monotonous dead level of current fiction, forms an excellent contrasting background for real merit. Great is the satisfaction then, after taking up a novel from which one expects nothing, to find that the writer actually...