It's a race!

There is another C. Fox Smith novel out there called THE SINGING SANDS but from the PUNCH review it didn't appear to be as interesting. Here's the review:

Singing Sands - Review in Punch Magazine, March 6, 1918, p. 160.

When a novelist is modestly content to label his or her
story as " An Episode," one must of course admit that
criticism is to some extent disarmed. At the same time
I feel bound to observe that any episode that includes in
its tumultuous course a murder, an elopement, a romance,
a desertion, not to specify many other considerable events,
3is in some danger of becoming overgrown. All these things
happened during a little visit that Lyndon Travess, the
heroine of Miss C. Fox SMITH'S new story, Singing Sands
(HODDER AND STOUGHTON), paid to some relations who
lived at this spot of the romantic name. It may save you
from the disillusion that awaited Lyndon and myself to
say at once that Singing Sands the place, not the story
by no means carries out the exquisite promise of its beauti-
ful title. As for the book itself, that I must confess has
put me into some sort of quandary ; I think I should be
inclined to compromise by calling it a good tale badly told.
Miss Fox SMITH'S manner seems at times to combine every
possible exasperation; it is lingering where the matter
demands speed, baffling where it should be clear, and
throughout uncertain, and even amateurish, to an almost
maddening degree, and yet one has further to admit that,
in the words of a celebrated tribute, she "gets there all the
same." Perhaps this is the reward of sincerity; in part it
is certainly due to her feeling for atmosphere. Singing
Sands contains some pen pictures of Canadian landscape
that are suggested with quite wonderful beauty. I am
bound to repeat, however, that in this crowded episode of
Lyndon's visit to her remarkable relations you may find
the places more attractive than the plot, the setting than
the very unsatisfactory set. Which of course, being precisely
what Miss Fox SMITH intended, is only another proof that,
against every handicap, she has done what I knew she
would, and readied her objective.

I do have a copy of her earliest novel CITY OF HOPE (copied by a loyal friend from a library in Tasmania!) which was quite disappointing, from my point of view.

Cheerily,
Charley Noble