SOURCE: Shafer, Fred. “Love and Guilt.” Chicago Tribune Books (19 November 1989): 4.

In the following laudatory review of War Babies, Shafer compliments Busch's skillful characterizations.

One of Frederick Busch's achievements as a writer of fiction lies in his ability to portray a mature, sensitive relationship between a man and a woman.

His latest novel, War Babies, centers on Peter Santore, an American lawyer whose father was a turncoat in the Korean War, and Hilary Pennel, the daughter of an English officer who died a martyr in the same POW camp where Santore's father collaborated with the enemy. They meet and fall swiftly in love when Peter travels to her home at Salisbury, in the south of England, hoping to obtain new information about the camp and perhaps ease his lifelong guilt over his father's actions.

It is to Busch's credit that the reader accepts the suddenness with which this affair...