SOURCE: A review of A Servant's Tale, in New York Times Book Review, November 18, 1984, p. 9.

In the following review, Giddings asserts that while A Servant's Tale begins with a well-developed sense of purpose and character, the novel loses focus when Fox moves her characters to an urban setting.

Luisa, the heroine in Paula Fox's fifth novel. A Servant's Tale, is born, out of wedlock, to a father who comes from a wealthy, plantation-owning family, the de la Cuevas. Her mother, whose family was reduced to peonage by the de la Cuevas, works as a kitchen servant in their vivienda, or "big house." Luisa, however, escapes the fate common to children of such unions when her father spurns a bride-to-be of his own station to marry Luisa's mother. For his impetuousness, he is disinherited. For her untimely birth and working-class bloodline, Luisa will never be more than "a bedbug...