SOURCE: Randall, Neil. Review of The Light in the Piazza, by Elizabeth Spencer. Quill and Quire 52, no. 3 (March 1986): 71.

In the following review of The Light in the Piazza, Randall praises Spencer for her understanding of the ties between character and setting.

Elizabeth Spencer's The Light in the Piazza collects three stories about Americans living in Italy. In all three, Spencer demonstrates her remarkable understanding of how characters are intimately bound to their setting, whether they are alien or native to that setting. Of the three stories, only one fails to satisfy. Knights and Dragons, the least successful of the three, is richly complex and extremely ambitious, but it suffers from its attempt to examine too many characters in too short a space. Like most of her work, it is beautifully written, but here the story gets lost in the density.

Neither of the other two stories makes this...