“It is emphatically an American story, full of the flavor of American life—American life, that is to say, as it is lived in such a small middle-western city as that one in which the scene of ‘The noon mark’ is laid. As this story progresses, the dominant figure is discovered to be that of Nettie Stieffel, whose father was in the accounting department of the Travelers and Traders’ bank. Clean-minded and clean-hearted, generous, brave, efficient, unimaginative and consequently a little hard, without an ounce of romance in her composition, honest and loyal to the core, and incidentally very good looking, she develops into an easily recognized type of American business woman, capable, hard-working, intelligent and dependable. When we leave her she is a married woman who has, as she herself says, ‘everything anybody could want,’ including a motor car—and happiness.”—N Y Times
“It is a story to be placed, by those who respond to this story-teller’s genial-ironic kind of thing, beside ‘The Boardman family’ and ‘The rise of Jennie Cushing,’—not a great novel but a real and solid one.” H. W. Boynton
+ Bookm 52:344 Ja ’21 380w
“It is, indeed, a small fragment of American life that Mrs Watts has described in ‘The noon mark,’ but it is a very real fragment and an extremely realistic portrayal of it.” E. F. Edgett
+ Boston Transcript p6 N 17 ’20 1400w
“Mrs Watts’s new novel is more rewarding in transit than in termination. The conclusion is indefinite in its effect, ending on an interrogation which does not flow naturally out of the materials with which the author started.” L. B.
+ − Freeman 2:406 Ja 5 ’21 130w
“In the loose-jointed aggregation which is our United States, there can be, we must conclude, no ‘American’ novel. There can be only sectional novels, the portraiture of a sort, of a class. Of these Mrs Watts is a valuable chronicler. She is selective. It is not the light of imagination that lives in her books, but the steady rays of the impartial sun.” Alice Brown
+ N Y Evening Post p4 D 4 ’20 880w