Vogelsang [of The Wicked Enchantment] is a German city. It is not obviously detached from the rest of the world, but through many centuries it has gone its own way, living for the most part contentedly beneath the shadow of the great Gothic cathedral. People from other towns say 'We are all a little touched', but the Vogelsanger madness is of an agreeable kind and the ghosts who haunt the town are mostly 'nice and respectable'. But evil comes to Vogelsang; to be precise, it comes from within the town, from the forgotten vault beneath the cathedral where Earl Owl of Owlhall rests uneasily. (The parallel with Nazi Germany is implicit.) (p. 133)

Margot Benary adopted an appropriately Gothic frame for her story, with an extravagance of style and numerous side-chapels and pinnacles of episode and sub-plot. The book has its share of Teutonic sentimentality too, but the general impression is, like the cathedral, of a unified and harmonious structure. The little world of Vogelsang, in turmoil or at peace, is the true hero of the story. (p. 134)

[The characters of The Ark] belong to the defeated race who have to rebuild their lives in the shadow of occupation. (p. 180)

The charm of The Ark springs from its concern with the realities of love and hunger. Food was a constant preoccupation of the families who clung to life in the harsh years of recovery, and the book is full of the bitterness of hunger and the glorious smell of food…. Children's literature is full of feasts, but few are described with such loving concern over each mouthful than the Lechows' Advent party with its four miraculous cakes.

The wonder of The Ark is not that it is a good book, for in many ways it falls short of excellence, but that it should have been written at all. It came out of war and defeat and out of the chaos that preceded reconstruction. Of the war there is little in the book; the author and the characters avoid direct reference to it when they can. Dieter, the young musician, recalls briefly his work on the West Wall and remembers: 'At home we never cared much for all the heiling and hurrahing'. After the war there is extreme hardship, humiliation as well as hunger, and the boredom of queueing. Mrs. Benary and the Lechows rise above it, largely through a strong sense of family which extends to their motley collection of friends, partly because deprivation and suffering help them to comprehend fundamental truths. (pp. 180, 182)

In its warmth and tenderness The Ark comes often to the brink of sentimentality. It never quite topples over. Mrs. Benary always harnesses sentiment to reality. Her finest achievement is the character of Margret, who more than the others carries into peacetime the scars of war. There is a remarkable episode in which she fights for the life of the puppies in her charge at Rowan Farm. Somehow the animals become associated in her mind with the dead children she had seen on the refugees' marches. It might be an incongruous and embarrassing moment were the writer's touch less sure. But the reader accepts that 'all the world's suffering had come down at once upon her.' (p. 182)

Benary approaches [the theme of growing up in wartime in] Dangerous Spring…. Karin, the adolescent daughter of a German liberal doctor, falls in love with a saintly pastor…. Karin is perhaps in love with him, or with life, or with the spring; in the last weeks of war she is wide open to influences, from art and nature and religion, and the lame and half-blind pastor provides the catalyst for her teeming emotions. It is a tender, pathetic, very slightly comic, picture of young love. But growth is accelerated in wartime, and during the terrors of bombing and greater perils from the liberating Russians, Karin grows up and gains the strength to lose her pastor.

This is a wise story, authentic in its details, which are based on the author's own experiences, yet surprisingly detached; the reader remains an observer instead of becoming … a partisan. (p. 203)