With trailing banners

About this book

In With Trailing Banners, (Little Brown) Estelle Aubrey Brown has written a powerful novel. It is about a little Protestant girl born in upstate New York about fifty years ago. The town, originally Protestant, is inundated by tides of incoming French and Irish Catholics. The little girl grows up in an atmosphere tense with racial and religious conflict. She sees the narrow-minded people of her own sect reluctantly yielding ground to the newcomers. She herself remains a symbol of sanity and tolerance. As a girl she makes friends with the daughter of a French harlot and, because her mother is too puritanical even to warn her, she is almost led into childish sin. Her mother is a timid religious woman who is suspicious of her daughter's radiant nature. The girl insists on changing her name from Mary to Merry despite her mother's grimaces. But her pagan longing for happiness is starved until, as a middle-aged Nora, she leaves her brutal husband and son and goes "down East." There is a sunny vitality about this book that is heartening. It has an intoxicating cleanliness and freshness for all the sordidness of its subject. Merry is a character that all of us have dreamed of being and Mrs. Brown has endowed her with a fiery verisimilitude.