Publisher's Synopsis
THIS period piece, The Twin Cousins, An Early American Romance Novel, by Oriana Atkinson is so exceptionally rewarding that it deserves more serious attention than the great majority of novels of the American past. Not a tale of derring-do but an honest attempt at a realistic re-creation of a time and a place in our national development; it is so convincing in its detail, so adept in its characterizations, so .charming in its style that it deserves a place near the top of the list in recent historical fiction. Mrs. Atkinson, author of "Over at Uncle Joe's" and "Big Eyes", writes the language of our early days with a wide vocabulary of old-time words and a manner so natural that the reader could easily be convinced that she still speaks it. Her style, moreover, has lucidity, a conscious naiveté and a spirit, particularly in the first half of her book.
The descriptions in Mrs. Atkinson's beginning chapter of the itinerant and bawdy tin-peddler and the even more traveled evangelistic parson of a widely scattered pioneer parish, fathers respectively of the young man and the girl whose love for each other is her main subject, are deft and amusing.
As for the story itself, it is a hearty tale of the roaring days when the old Hudson River town of Catskill was crowded with boatmen, tanners, lumber-jacks and rogues who preyed upon them. The great idea of the moment was a wide road west to the banks of the Susquehanna and the young kinsmen, Myron and Potter Ware who looked alike, conceived the idea of a partnership in the highway's first tavern, which they chose to call "The Twin Cousins." Theirs is an exciting narrative of early American enterprise.
The Twin Cousins is so compelling and so well told that some readers will regret that the author did not choose a more ambitious theme. A love story in which the major conflicts are a lusty husband's infidelities to a morally exacting wife may make for good reading, but it is a minor goal for an artist as able as Oriana Atkinson.
