[In the following review, Blackburn presents a brief outline of the plot of The Crystal Cave and praises the book as a "colorful romance."]

Fifth-century Britain is the setting of Miss Stewart's new novel [The Crystal Cave], and its hero is the magical Merlin, seen here from his youth as a court bastard in Wales through the far-flung adventures that lead to his hand in the birth of King Arthur, whose destiny he is to guide as he rules Britain. It is as the author notes, not a work of scholarship, but "a work of the imagination," and its hero offers Miss Stewart fine opportunity for building the kind of colorful romance that has made her books so widely read in this country.

In Miss Stewart's version, Merlin is a solitary but game little boy whose Sight is kept secret during the difficult childhood he spends in the court of his grandfather, the King of Wales, where he is recognized as the result of a dark coupling between the King's daughter and the devil himself. After clandestine seminars in the cave of an old and learned wizard, and the acquisition of five languages, he escapes by necessity to "Less Britain" and the protection of kindly Count Ambrosius, where he not only learns his true and proud identity, but becomes a trusted participant and even initiator in the struggle which is to unite all of Britain. There is an impressive cast of characters and many of them are drawn in considerable dimension, so that Miss Stewart makes it easy for us to imagine that this is what life might have been like in a still-divided Britain as it moved to free itself from the effects of Roman rule. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that the novel is peppered throughout with the regulation political intrigues, formidable nunneries, fierce battle scenes and secret ceremonies—there is even a bit of Druid rite and human sacrifice—so necessary to the atmosphere of such romances. But Miss Stewart brings them off with an easy talent for making them real elements of the plot, not mere sideshow devices, and her Merlin makes a narrator quite worthy of the large audience that will doubtless be following his adventures this summer. She is no Zoë Oldenbourg, nor does she pretend to be.