SOURCE: Review of Blessings, by Anna Quindlen. Kirkus Reviews 70, no. 17 (1 September 2002): 1258.

In the following review, the critic provides a lukewarm assessment of Quindlen's Blessings.

[Blessings is the] fourth adult novel from Newsweek columnist Quindlen (Black and Blue, 1998, etc.), a story of lost souls redeemed by love.

A friend of Lydia Blessing once told her that there was a secret at the heart of every family and—predictably—it's revealed that the Blessing family had dark secrets to spare. Eighty years old when the story begins, Lydia lives more in the past than present, haunted by memories. Her handsome, ne'er-do-well, secretly homosexual brother Sunny was a shotgun suicide; and Lydia's long-ago marriage to Sunny's best friend Ben Carton was a sham (madly in love with Sunny, Ben obligingly married his sister, though she was pregnant by another man, then conveniently died in WWII). Her charming father had evidently married...