“the story as a whole stands as one of her more convincing efforts: an ode to the complexities of familial love, the centripetal and centrifugal forces that keep families together and send their members flying apart, the supremely ordinary pleasures and frustrations of middle-class American life.”

Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times)

A 2004 Vacation Reading (selected by The New York Times)
“An ambitious exploration of domestic dislocation, ranging over 60 years of American experience, beginning with the marriage of Tyler's two ‘amateurs,’ thrown together after the attack on Pearl Harbor.”