SOURCE: Gardner, Marilyn. “Fugitive Life of a Battered Wife: Details of a Home Torn Apart.” Christian Science Monitor 90, no. 53 (11 February 1998): 15.

In the following review, Gardner provides lukewarm praise for Quindlen's Black and Blue.

When Anna Quindlen was mapping the social landscape of late-20th-century America as a columnist for The New York Times, she wrote regularly about domestic violence. With a blend of compassion and outrage, she gave eloquent voice to a sisterhood of women who remain largely silent and invisible.

Now, in her third novel, Black and Blue, Quindlen has turned those real-life women into a courageous fictional heroine, Fran Benedetto, a 38-year-old Brooklyn nurse. After enduring years as “a punching bag and marionette” in the hands of her husband, Bobby, a policeman, Fran flees, taking the couple's 10-year-old son, Robert, with her. She is aided by an underground network of nameless volunteers who help abused women...