28 JANUARY 1893, Page 13

Friends/or Life. By Blanche A. L. Garoock. (Glen and Hall.)—

Here we have the career of a young girl who is brought up alone in a house with a bachelor uncle, detailed to us by means of her diary and that of a girl-friend. She is, of course, a young heathen, and the terror of her more staid acquaintances. How she im- proves steadily till she is happily married, is to be read in the pages of Friends for Life,—and fairly good reading it is too, though often tedious ; and occasionally her irreligion is rather too coarsely and, one might almost say, blasphemously brought forward. • The heroine, whatever she may be, certainly never pre- tends to be a lady ; but, as a character, she is a possibility.