Only a master craftsman, and one who has worked so much in the period that it has become a kind of second home in time, would dare to undertake that most familiar of themes—Boston at the outbreak of the war. Such a novelist is Esther Forbes and to ["Johnny Tremain"] she brings such freshness and vitality that one reads it with the avidity with which one follows today's news, with the extra dividend of pleasurable recognition of half forgotten episodes thrown in.

The reason, of course, is that Miss Forbes not only knows the wharves, the inns, the very cobblestones of eighteenth-century Boston about as intimately as her own back yard, but because she creates three dimensional people. Historical figures are clothed in flesh as well as good broadcloth, even casual street figures are endowed for the moment of their appearance with reality, and thus we see...