["Sweetly Sings the Donkey"] is a collection of eight stories, character sketches and assorted fragments of varying length and merit…. Miss Delaney writes well, and none of these pieces is without some charm or interest; nearly all deserve magazine publication—isn't that what magazines are for?—and, in fact, several appeared previously, as an acknowledging note tells us, in Evergreen Review and the Saturday Evening Post. But there is no particular reason for them to appear between hard covers, except that the present literary situation seems to demand of authors—and especially of those whose extreme youth is one of their selling points—that they produce a volume with metronome regularity at least once every two years….

The best and most ambitious section of this volume is the long title piece, "Sweetly Sings the Donkey." This is a memoir of time the author spent as an adolescent in...