“A forceful, pathetic, but most unpleasant book.” Frederic Taber Cooper.
– + Bookm. 24: 387. D. ’06. 350w.
“Mr. Thurston does not suggest the possession of the imaginative sympathy or even the ordinary knowledge of life that would warrant him in attempting so tremendous a task as this. He writes easily, but there is not in all these 450 pages any indications of vision, any profound sense of human nature. The book is smooth and superficial, and, shorn of its coarseness, conventional in every line.”
– + Lond. Times. 5: 84. Mr. 9, ’06. 820w.
“Mr. Thurston more than accomplishes his object of rousing the sympathy and indignation of the reader. His characters also are both lifelike and interesting. But the incessant painfulness of the situation is continuously distressing, so that the book is anything but a restful novel, while the plain speaking in describing coarse viciousness exceeds good taste and sound literary judgment.”
– + Outlook. 84: 584. N. 9, ’06. 240w.
“The story is written in the spirit of rancour, and of obstinate prejudice, and is therefore useless as a protest against the imagined wrongs which have inflamed its author’s spirit.”
– Sat. R. 101: 369. Mr. 24, ’06. 120w.
“It is seldom one meets with a book so wholly disagreeable as this novel.”
– Spec. 96: 345. Mr. 3, ’06. 140w.