In "Bright Skin" Mrs. Peterkin has made an attempt to repeat the episodic pattern of "Black April," though on a diminished scale, and the book will suffer, perhaps unjustly, from the inevitable comparison with the earlier work. Yet for all the similarity of pattern, there is a difference in intention between the two books. "Black April" depended less upon intimate characterization than upon a mass effect; its hero, the gigantic plantation foreman, April, being of heroic proportions, was also of the heroic generality; and the background of hog-killings, duck hunts, dancing and cotton picking, against which April's generalized figure was projected, usurped the book and made it the work of enduring beauty that it is.

The present work, too, makes much of the background of the sea-island country of Carolina…. [This tends] to give the work the cyclic, episodic effect of "Black April." But there is more of...