SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Chaos, Convincingly.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (16 May 1993): 3, 8.

In the following review, Eder finds that the beginning of Long Way from Home would be excellent as a short story, but by stretching the story to novel length, Busch loses the tight plot and seamless flow present in his other works.

The opening of Frederick Busch's new novel [Long Way from Home] is like an abandon-ship alarm in the small hours of the morning. In our cloudy awakening, it is a siren too insistent to be imagined; at the same time there is the dream-like chaos of feet pattering in different directions, a continual unintelligible snarling over the ship's loudspeaker and the unmistakable fact that the deck lists.

The Mastricola family had somehow chugged along despite failing engines, sprung plates and erratic steering. Busch starts off with the day all these things give way at once...