The novels of Mr. Rhys Davies have revealed a true development. As his last one, "Honey and Bread," was his most delicately and sensitively felt, so its sequel, "A Time to Laugh," is his strongest and most consistently satisfying, his largest not merely in length. We call it a sequel, and it is truly so, though the connexion in terms of characters is a tenuous one, and it may be read independently with complete enjoyment. Only Bronwen, heroine of "Honey and Bread," that almost-idyll of a typically lovely South Wales valley on the eve of its industrial transformation, lives on into this new work, as grandmother of the hero of this story of the same valley sixty years later, at the very end of the nineteenth century.

The earlier book was, up to its last pages, pastoral; this, in contrast, is angrily industrial. The whole life of the valley now centres in the coalpits, and now, where peace was, is the ceaseless, bitter struggle for power. The story opens on the violence of strike-riots and the looting of food-shops, quietens for a while, rises again to anger in another strike and yet more prolonged clashes with fellow-miners, police and soldiers, and then, following a perceptible but natural rhythm, subdues itself to the moment of pause which greets the new century's advent.

All the characters are well chosen to give to the tale its fullest value….

Many scenes stand out as especially vivid—the riotings, the religious revival, the march over the mountain to Abba Vale—but the writing is always admirable, and the whole is as firm and pleasing and individual as anything Mr. Davies has done.