SOURCE: A review of Faces in the Water, in Saturday Review, September 9, 1961, p. 23.

Pippett is a British editor, biographer, and critic. In the following review, she finds that Frame expresses "an underlying truth about our common humanity" in Faces in the Water.

A prefatory note states that this book, [Janet Frame's Faces in the Water,] although in documentary form, is a work of fiction. This claim to be true in outline and essence is amply justified. As a report on mental hospitals in New Zealand it checks with accounts from many countries about similar conditions of overcrowding and shortage of adequately trained staffs. As a novel it carries conviction because the author has artistic integrity and intuitive understanding. She is firmly in control of her material and sure of her direction, as the unfortunate girl who here tells her own story of nine years of physical confinement and...