Miss Gallant's characters [in Green Water, Green Sky] come out of a world that recalls the fine, delicate novels of Isabel Bolton. But here everything is made hard and bright. Bonnie is a foolish woman who has fled a scandal and spent her life in Europe. She is full of pretensions and shallow selfishness, a woman who cannot survive without devouring others' lives, particularly her daughter's. Between Bonnie and her daughter, Florence, there exists a mixture of "love and resentment … one reflecting the other, water under sky." They are imprisoned by each other, tied together by their lack of a real home, surrounded through their lives by people who seem to embody their aspirations….

Bonnie's life is filled with the image of a past she has lost and tries to hold on to for its uses; she has a shrewdness and adaptability, the shrewdness of the sentimental egotist...