Popular Blend

LITTLE SHIPS--Kathleen Norris-- Doubleday, Page ($2.00). Said Rupert Hughes of Kathleen Norris: "She lives life, reads people and writes books." He might well have added that she eats a hearty breakfast, loves children and dresses stylishly. So many magazine writers do the same. There is little or nothing to distinguish one from another, and the differences among their respective works are equally invisible. Yet somehow the great public discriminates, and the reception Mother got in 1911 marked Mrs. Norris as one of our elect. To her ability as a straightforward, reportorial storyteller, she seems to add a blend of sentiment that is highly popular. This story is about a large Irish-Catholic family in San Francisco--the mother praying and dreaming about her "little angels," the boys getting jobs, the girls getting married, the father trying to govern his family without assistance from the convent nuns.