So fragmentary as hardly to be called a work of fiction, Mary Stolz' ["Truth and Consequence"] is a series of sketches of people who are merely linked together by the circumstance of living in the same neighborhood. But these are singularly alive and acute sketches. Miss Stolz has an exceptional talent for understanding people….

Miss Stolz' greatest merit is that she does not overheighten the characteristics of her people. They are real and reasonable…. Miss Stolz is quietly understanding of the Negro maid, Coral,… and the great pride which makes Coral classify white people into groups which are stereotypes, never intimates. There is the same understanding of Karen, the young woman married to a perfect but boring physical specimen, and of all the others who people this gifted little novel. Some day Miss Stolz will round out her unusual sympathy for people into a more concrete and meaningful...