Beneath the outrageous all-inclusiveness of her brilliant title ["Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team"], Jessamyn West has assembled fourteen of the most entertaining and tenderly humorous short stories lately published by any American author. On the basis of her novels. "The Witch Diggers" and "Cress Delahanty," and these shorter pieces, it is now perfectly clear that Miss West is a real writer, in love with a world that she is capable of objectifying, and combining the pathetic, the curious and the ironic, in balanced proportions….

Often … the oddities of human character are the refuge of a weak writer. This is not true of Miss West. Without apparent effort she shows paradoxically the centricity of what is eccentric and the uncommonness of the common through a whole gallery of memorable people. The best of these stories happily combine the pathetic and the ironic…. Readers may feel that one...