Life with Its Sorrow, Life with Its Tear — Lester Atwell

Once in America there were houses with deep, shady porches and cool, green lawns under hundred-year-old trees and sunlit attics filled with memories and old furniture where you could sit and read Tarzan of the Apes. This is the world of Lester Atwell's wonderful novel of the Thirties, Life with Its Sorrow, Life with Its Tear. Into just such a house of warmth and security and love, filled with aunts and cousins, an eccentric uncle and a pair of twin boys, comes Paul Foster - an orphan at fourteen. The story is of his life with the Carmody's, but particularly with Uncle Reggie, who calls himself a lawyer but whose real vocation is to initiate Paul, first to life's beauties and wonder and finally, tragically, to its sorrow. "Excellent ... so beautifully constructed, so moving that it captures reader interest right away. Mr. Atwell's novel is in the old-fashioned tradition, its appeal in an age turned into nostalgia is enormous." --Publishers' Weekly