There Is Today

"All of Miss Lawrence's novels -- it is one of their defects -- can be reduced to the simplest of formulas. In 'There Is Today' the problem which she poses is whether youth should postpone marriage for the duration of the war or should snatch what happiness it can while it may. The Thanes, her young hero and heroine, choose the latter course, and are justified so richly for their courage that there can scarcely be a question of where the author's sympathies lie....

"Miss Lawrence . . . recreates most amusingly our very recent past, and her vignettes of the knitters, the hoarders, the fanatic war workers, etc., are in her most pithy and most fruitful vein. When it comes to her actual story, however, I feel that she has stacked the cards more patly and more shamelessly than usual . . . . All in all, this strikes me as a pretty synthetic book -- albeit, as usual, a readable one."

Edith H. Walton, "Hoarded Moments," New York Times, 25 Oct. 1942


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