This first novel ["Owls Do Cry"] is very promising, full of the beginner's desire to get everything in, and full of good things mixed up with blunders. Through a fog of deliberately overwritten prose, one gets glimpses of a well-understood working-class New Zealand family muddling along through more than its share of trouble. It is possible to pick up enough of the family's story to realize that Miss Frame is a very sharp judge of character and a writer with a real narrative gift. However, somewhere along the line she has acquired the idea that these are old-fashioned and unaesthetic things to be, and that writing, to be good, ought to be difficult. The result is a tantalizing mess—a book that would have been genuinely impressive if it had been handled simply, instead of being swamped in faked profundity and complexity. (pp. 103-04)

"Briefly Noted: 'Owls Do...