SOURCE: See, Carolyn. “A Back-Yard Story Mired in the Morass.” Los Angeles Times (22 April 1991): E2.

In the following review, See concludes that while much of Quindlen's Object Lessons is contrived, Quindlen exhibits a willingness to create horrible female characters.

In the suburban town of Kenwood, just on the northern border of the Bronx, Maggie Scanlon grows up as a de facto half-caste. Her mother, Constance, is a gorgeous Italian Catholic. Maggie's maternal grandfather still survives as a gardener-caretaker in a lush Italian-Catholic cemetery. But Connie has married “up” into the huge Irish-Catholic Scanlon family. That grandfather, driven by greed and acquisitiveness, has made a very sizable fortune selling everything from cement to sacred vestments for Mass—vestments churned out in total squalor, over in the Philippine Islands, by overworked young girls in dreadful sweatshops.

It is Grandfather Scanlon's good pleasure to keep his extended family jumping through hoops...