SOURCE: McLellan, Faith. “Where the Bruises and Hurts Live On.” Lancet (27 June 1998): 1970.

In the following review, McLellan concludes that Quindlen's gifts as a columnist have served her well in Black and Blue.

In the hospital I'd learned that there are really two kinds of people in the world, people who go hard and efficient in times of terrible trouble, and the ones … who scream, shriek, go limp, sink to the floor, become patients themselves.” Fran Benedetto, the nurse who is the protagonist of Anna Quindlen's compelling novel [Black and Blue], has, after years of physical abuse by her New York cop husband, Bobby, gone hard and efficient, has taken their 10-year-old son, Robert, and vanished. She has allowed herself to be spirited away from everything she knows, to begin again, with a different job, an invented past, and a future as Elizabeth Crenshaw, in Lake Plata, Florida, a...