A new book by Noel Streatfeild is always something to which we look forward. Since the days of Ballet Shoes she has concerned herself with families where the children have marked talents for dancing, music, skating or acting, and where the parents take a prominent part in the working out of the story. The circus and the world of films have also been used as backgrounds, and the ordinary schoolchild with little or no talent in any of these directions, may well be fascinated for a time with the details of training for these professions. [Apple Bough] is no exception; David and Polly (the father and mother of the children) are musical and artistic; Sebastian, Wolfgang and Ethel are respectively highly talented as violinist, film star and ballerina—only Myra, the eldest, seems to have been left out when the fairies distributed their gifts. She, however, discovers that...