Talk:The Loom of Destiny

Reviews
Bookman (US) December 1890
 * Mr. Stringer knows his Kipling well. From "The Drums of the Fore and Aft," "Baa! Baa! Black Sheep," "Wee Willie Winkle," and "His Majesty the King," he has drawn a good, sturdy inspiration, and in the stories which make up The Loom of Destiny he has given us little men and women who are very interesting and very much flesh and blood. The children of these tales are very pathetic, very combative and very much given to wondering over grave things. Before Mr. Kipling, the orthodox child of fiction was rather a flabby, colourless little creature whose imagination was bounded by rag dolls, fisticuffs, and taffy. From the tragedies and griefs of the grown-up world he was as free as a comfortably fed lap-dog. But all that is changed. The child in fiction has become a reasoning being, strangely sensitive, and impressionable through lack of that callousness and practical sense of proportion which sustain his elders when face to face with life's ironies. From Kipling, Mr. Stringer has learned the trick of setting the child mind and child nature in a story that in itself appeals strongly to the intelligence of the grown man or woman. Of the fourteen short tales which make up the Loom of Destiny, there is hardly one which does not bear the imprint of the Kipling influence. Take, as an instance, one of the best of these stories, "The Honour of the House of Hummerley," which tells of a very brave and chivalrous little boy who saves his mother in a moment of great danger. It would be absurd to charge Mr. Stringer with imitation, and yet the mind very naturally reverts to the story of a somewhat similar episode in the life of "His Majesty the King." Throughout The Loom of Destiny there runs—as there should run through all books which tell of child life—the strain of strong pathos. Beneath the rugged exterior, the boisterous enthusiasm of the boy, the author finds a certain wistfulness that demands treatment that is sympathetic. This is equally true of the children of the rich and the children of the slums. "Thicker than Water" tells of an English boy and an English girl homesick in New York. The stories of The Loom of Destiny are all entertaining and almost all good, but one is provoked to the criticism that too many of the children in these pages are more like English than American boys and girls.

Outlook 6 January 1900:
 * This is a collection of stories by a man who has a wonderful insight into the minds of children, their temptations, their doubts, their aspirations—especially of the children of tenements. Never have they had such a sympathetic record of their joys and sorrows. These stories are interpretations of child life in the tenements and the streets.