SOURCE: Moore, Caroline. “The Life and Hard Times of a Squeeze-Box.” Spectator 277, no. 878 (12 October 1996): 48–49.

In the following review, Moore offers a positive assessment of Accordion Crimes.

Many of those who admired E. Annie Proulx's magnificent second novel, The Shipping News, must have rushed off to buy her first, Postcards. They will have found there the same rich ingredients: Proulx's winning eye for the peculiar, her ear for the rhythms of speech, and the blazing vigour of her descriptive prose. At times, however, Postcards tilted towards a sort of American Cold Comfort Farm:

Mink clenched the carving knife, sawed at the ham. The ham smelled like blood. Cold air crawled along the floor, the ferret scurried in the wall … ‘Pass the plates.’ Mink's voice, gone thin since his tractor accident a few years ago, seemed caught in some glottal anatomic trap.

In Postcards, men rarely escape mutilation by machinery...