SOURCE: "The Road to Independence," in The Times Literary Supplement, November 9, 1984, p. 1281.

In the following review, Adcock observes that Frame's collection You Are Now Entering the Human Heart mixes realism with "bizarre fantasy and semi-didactic allegory."

The first volume of Janet Frame's absorbing autobiography, To the Is-Land, told of her childhood in the South Island of New Zealand with her railwayman father, her harassed "poetic" mother who talked of books but never had time to read them, her brother, and her three sisters. The oldest sister drowned, the brother was seriously epileptic, there was never enough money; but Janet, in her skimpy home-made uniform and embarrassing home-made sanitary towels, got through High School and was accepted for training as a teacher. An Angel at My Table begins with her journey south from Oamaru, from a family that seemed "enveloped in doom", to the Training College in Dunedin. She...