Before finishing the first chapter of [Mad Shadows], I had that sinking feeling all composition teachers have experienced reading the intensely subjective outpourings of an adolescent mind. But by the time I had read half of the book, I was caught in the world created by the author's nineteen-year-old imagination. She had proved the validity of Conrad's stricture on the Romantic sensibility, that it must "in the destructive element immerse". Miss Blais has plunged into her nature and written a parable out of what she discovered there. Like other figurative narratives, this novel can be understood on more than one level. (pp. 72-3)

Freud, for instance, would appreciate the mother's love for her idiot son, and the daughter's hatred of both, not to mention her idealization of her dead father: "Far off in her childhood, she could see her father, the austere peasant, the maker of bread. When...