There are twenty stories in ["Country Growth"], and in each of them the most consistent character in all Derleth's serious writing appears—the Wisconsin landscape, which is conveniently varied … by prairie, hill country and cliff-edged river. The people in the stories are the people Derleth knows so thoroughly, the small towners and farmers of the region.
A few of the stories in this book are predominantly lyric in tone, but most of them are traditionally conceived sketches and fables of Sac Prairie inhabitants. "Goodbye Margery" and "Girl in Time Lost," which begin and end the book, are examples of the first method; they are subjective idylls about the same love affair, and they skillfully invoke the atmosphere of a small town of yesterday, the hushed heavy summer evenings with the boy and girl walking through the streets, hardly articulate even in quarrel. Many of the remaining stories are lightly comic, with town gossips and shrewd farmers figuring largely in their personnel. Several of these concern a single family, viewed from a boy's angle of vision. "A Holiday for Three" is the chronicle of a bicycle tour made by the boy and his great-uncle and another farmer, Gus Elker, who cover an amazing amount of Midwest territory on their odd trip. Although the story is partly spoiled by the forced humor of its ending, the middle parts of it contain some energetic contributions to American humorous literature. Occasionally, in some of the other short stories of these same characters, Derleth tends to create an elaborate story-structure for the sake of an anecdote: the result is barely worth the effort in the title story, but in some of the tales there is a rich center of humor which unites character and anecdote. This is particularly true in "The Alphabet Begins with AAA," the hilarious account of Gus Elker's experience with an AAA representative.
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