SOURCE: "Southern Comfort," in New York Magazine, Vol. 24, No. 13, April 1, 1991, p. 63.

In the following excerpt, Koenig enthusiastically reviews A Cure for Dreams. She notes, however, that Gibbons appears, occasionally, to confuse morality with self-righteousness.

"When my mother was a young girl she spent the pinks of summer evenings sitting on the banks of the Brownies Creek, where it flows into the Cumberland River. She always sat with a ball of worsted in her lap, knitting and dreaming of love coming to her."

So begins Kaye Gibbons's third and, once again, absolutely darling novel. It's hard to praise a book like A Cure for Dreams without sounding nauseating, or giving the impression that it's all the horrible things implied by "perky," "plucky," and "dear." I suppose if there is a platonic perky, plucky, and dear, though—ones that have resisted the gunky accretions of self-dramatizing cuteness—it's here that...