Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Dear Enemy

Dear Enemy is the 1915 sequel to Daddy-Long-Legs, a delightful if slightly flawed 1912 book. This book is, sadly, much more flawed, because of a running discussion of eugenics that probably seemed exciting and timely when this book was written but now comes across as, at best, wincingly dated.

Our main character, Sallie McBride, was a minor character in the first book. In this one, Judy, the heroine of Daddy-Long-Legs, convinces Sallie, her best friend from college, to accept the job of running the orphanage where Judy grew up. Sallie swears it's only temporary, because she has other plans for her life. But life has a way of happening and children have a way of worming their way into your heart.

Dear Enemy, like Daddy-Long-Legs, is an epistolary book; it's made up of Sallie's letters to several people, mostly Judy, Sallie's on-and-off boyfriend Gordon, and Dr. Robin MacRae, the local doctor who takes an interest in the orphanage and is the "Dear Enemy" of the title. He and Sallie get into a lot of disagreements.

This book is really tough for me to rate:

Parts of Dear Enemy rate 5 stars: Sallie is funny and engaging, and I loved reading about the orphanage, the lives and exploits of the children and workers there, and Sallie's heroic efforts to improve life for her charges and to expand her own horizons. Sallie has some great, insightful comments about life.

Parts of it rate 3 stars: the love story is undercooked and the ending too abrupt for me.

Parts of it rate 1 star: Sallie has these periodic discussions about eugenics with Dr. MacRae, who favors it, which threw me out of the story every time, in a very unpleasant way. Eugenics ― the idea of improving the human races through selective breeding, encouraging reproduction by those with higher intelligence and other valued qualities, and discouraging or even preventing reproduction by undesirable people, like criminals and the mentally or physically handicapped ― was a serious philosophy in the early 20th century when this book was written. It fell into social disfavor only after the Nazi regime showed how far this could sink, and now these ideas are deeply repugnant and disturbing.

Whether you'll enjoy this book overall depends on whether you can give this part ― which is a fairly minor but not insignificant piece of the story ― a pass and consider it in the context of the times when this book was written.

It averages out to 3 stars, so that's where my rating is going to land.

Free ebook on Amazon and Gutenberg.