SOURCE: Fennell, Frank L. Review of Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen. America 178, no. 20 (6 June 1998): 25-6.

In the following review, Fennell offers a mixed assessment of Black and Blue.

“Pulitzer Prize-winner”—it is a phrase she rather likes, Anna Quindlen admitted once during a television interview. And well she should—first, because she has earned it, for her earlier New York Times column “Public & Private,” and, second, because the chief virtue of her fiction writing is the ability to dramatize an issue in a way similar to the impassioned essays that first brought her to our attention.

Black and Blue, Quindlen's third novel, is the first-person narrative of Fran Benedetto, a 38-year-old nurse and mother and frequent victim of the brutal violence inflicted on her by her husband, Bobby, a New York City police detective. For years Bobby, in his periodic fits of rage, has cursed, slapped, choked...