M. M. Kaye Critical Essay | Critical Essay by The New Yorker

Critical Essay by The New Yorker

[In Trade Wind, as usual,] Miss Kaye's heroine and hero (this time, an orphaned American socialite and an English-born, Anglophobic smuggler) are outsiders and iconoclasts; while they despise the arrogance of Victorian talk about "progress and the millennium," they cannot adopt the cold-blooded resignation of some of their Eastern friends, the difference between intervention and interference must be learned by trial and error. Miss Kaye's ideal reader would be an amateur of British colonial history with a weakness for romantic fantasy; most readers will enjoy her novels for one of her specialties and in spite of the other. (p. 87)

A review of "Trade Wind," in The New Yorker (© 1981 by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.), Vol. LVII, No. 23, July 27, 1981, pp. 86-7.