In Apple-Blossom Time

Clara Louise Burnham subtitled this 1919 novel “A Fairy-Tale to Date,” and she holds to that frame by casting her characters as folk-tale figures: an Ogre, a Prince, a Good Fairy. The story follows Geraldine Melody, a young woman left orphaned by her father’s death and abandoned by an indifferent stepmother, who ends up stranded on a hardscrabble farm and pressed toward marriage by the grasping Rufus Carder. Her rescue starts with a chance restaurant meeting: Miss Mehitable Upton, a warm-hearted shopkeeper from a fashionable seaside resort, takes the girl’s part and sets larger wheels turning. Help eventually arrives through Ben Barry, a young aviator. Written late in Burnham’s career, it pairs breezy New England color with the tidy moral shape of a fairy tale, a gentle romance for readers who like their hardships put right.