The mid-1920's in America are remembered as a time of prosperity and expansiveness, and the literature of those years shows us the Babbitts, the Gatsbys, and the Dodsworths living in a confident and careless country. But ["Tomorrow Will Be Better"] pictures the little people, whose lives are made up of poverty and postponements, in the mean streets and up the dark stairways that prosperity never finds. Through the cycles of economic change they carry their gnawing worries, their secret ...

[Aside] from the paucity of Miss Smith's writing powers, the deficiencies of ["Tomorrow Will Be Better"] are great enough to exclude it from even the most summery of summer readings. The aim to exploit Brooklyn is obvious, but the result fails to communicate any special sense of place…. There is not a single memorable image, no sensory impressions of odors or sounds of Brooklyn and Brooklyn flats, and no real understanding of the squalor of Brooklyn poor. The method used to denot...

In writing another novel about an Irish family in Brooklyn ["Maggie-Now"], Betty Smith has more courage than foresight. Her Brooklyn "Tree"—symbol of all the unsung beauty of the commonplace—has taken root in millions of hearts all over the world. No younger tree planted in the same spot can hope to be so vigorous; inveitably, it will be overshadowed…. If the Nolans were stereotypes; if their strength and weakness, their joy and sorrow appeared in picture-pos...

The worst thing about Maggie-Now … is not its sentimentality, nor its staleness, nor even Miss Smith's monotonous narrative scheme, which grinds through four generations of tiresome people saying the same things over and over. The worst thing about Maggie-Now is its inexcusable lack of compassion. In dealing with the problems of the human spirit, Betty Smith exhibits very little vision, less sympathy and sensitivity, still less awareness of complexity. Her people are invariably malicious, igno...

Brooklyn in the early years of the century, swarming with immigrants of all nationalities, mostly warm-hearted, is a terrain not unknown to readers of contemporary fiction; and it is the setting of Miss Smith's new, long, curiously absorbing and shamelessly sentimental novel [Maggie-Now]…. Miss Smith narrates with that talent for the creation of interesting background detail, idealized sorrows and the polished surfaces of life, which is often characteristic of this kind of extremely skilful, c...