Songs My Mother Taught Me takes its title from a sentimental Victorian drawing room ballad. This seems appropriate for a portrait of a battered but charming adolescent girl who spends a great deal of time wallowing in selfish self-pity. There is, however, a courageousness about Isobel Cleary which engages the reader, in spite of the literary and nostalgic paraphernalia that surrounds her.

Occasionally one encounters a talented and evocative writer who does not trust her own talent. Audrey Thomas's fourth work is a novel marked by this kind of doubt. In a sense the novel is a regression for Mrs. Thomas. Each of her books flirts with the trendy, with the literary cliché. But in the earlier books the use of Dante, Lewis Carroll, John Fowles, Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Borges, is integrated into the atmospheric conditions which prevail in the mind of the narrator. In Songs My Mother...