[Miss Ferber] believes in beauty—a belief which is all right so long as you don't talk about it at all, or do talk about it with the felicity of genius: the talk about it in 'So Big' is unfortunately tinged with sentimentality. Still, the story is energetic and in places almost thrilling. It tells of a woman who sets herself to fight the sardonic powers of nature, and wring from her own ignorance and the capricious soil a livelihood for herself and a chance of living for her son. The son turns out to be nothing better than a success. He does not create beauty; he just successfully sells bonds…. Dirk, handsome, athletic, popular, is a dreadful disappointment to his mother. This raises a number of questions, to which life returns the implacable and impartial answer of fact…. The old cheap lie that the good man becomes rich and dies respected, has been long ago exposed; but its successor, that the devotion to unworldly standards necessarily brings a reward of appreciations and exaltations in this world, is still rampant. I do not, of course, accuse Miss Ferber of anything as crude as that. But she does set the pursuit of beauty in definite contrast to easy achievement; and possibly it escapes her notice that she has to give her beauty-pursuers a considerable measure of worldly success in order to make her contrast at all. But I do wrong to a charming novel by pursuing it too closely with speculation.