SOURCE: Linfield, Susie. “From Discord, a Wife Makes a Nice New Life—Too Nice.” Los Angeles Times (4 March 1998): E6.

In the following review, Linfield asserts that while Quindlen's Black and Blue is well-paced, the novel remains too glib and predictable.

In her column “Public and Private,” which ran in the New York Times for five years and won a Pulitzer Prize, Anna Quindlen exemplified the essence of a very nice feminist. She consistently took positions that were reasonable and fair, arguing in favor of justice and equality. But hers was a feminism that was essentially safe—for cozy suburbanites, for corporate profits, for life as we know it. She wanted to tinker with the world, not transform it.

In her new novel [Black and Blue], Quindlen takes on a subject that is anything but nice: domestic violence. This is the story of Fran Benedetto, a working-class woman from...