text: By chance before picking this up I had just finished The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, and was struck by the similarities and differences. It's a great "compare and contrast" pair, as an exercise for high-schoolers.
  
  Both are written as first-person accounts by teen-aged girls and are roughly contemporary. Heart published in 1940, and Castle in 1948, both about life in the 30s. 
  
  Both families are poor. In Castle though, there is never any question that the girls might go off and get jobs. This is supposedly because they "don't know how to do anything". So instead they sell off their belongings and get by on scraps of bread and the odd bit of butter. How charming! They are "eccentric", which seems enough in the author's eyes to exempt them from the expectation of supporting themselves. Only Stephen the handsome young son of the late housekeeper, enamored of Cassandra, does work and gives the family his entire salary. But he is of the class that is expected to toil after all. Even he is rewarded in the end--able to avoid labor with an easy job similar to that of step-mum Topaz--striking poses.
  
  Unlike the looming and grinding poverty of Heart then, the poverty in the Castle never amounts to more than a lark--educated folks playing at being poor until they're rescued by romantic circumstance. Not so in America where Mick Kelly, who didn't know how to do anything either, went off to work at Woolworth's, and to a life of little hope.
  
  In Castle the solution comes in the form of that classic deus ex machina, the inheritance. Two dashing young wealthy Americans one of whom has inherited the castle, show up just in time, with their chatty modern mum. They throw money around and talk too much, in the cliched extravagant American style. Most of the remainder of the novel consists of Cassandra and her sister Rose swooning over one brother or the other, with an eventual romantic result that assures all the characters of economic well being.
   
  It's all so very charming, bourgeois, and harmless. If your life is hard don't worry--a man will show up to rescue you!
  
  The reviews for this novel in Amazon are overwhelmingly positive. Smith was obviously talented. Her writing is elegant and a pleasure to read. I wish she had given Cassandra a little more ambition.
  