SOURCE: “A Meeting at Concord,” in New York Times Book Review, April 23, 1961, p. 38.

In the following review, Fearing offers positive assessment of April Morning.

Two meanings are attached to the title April Morning. The first is a literal reference to the action that took place throughout the Middlesex countryside in 1775 when the British forces marched out to capture certain stores in Lexington and Concord. The second is a symbolic dramatization of the turning point in the life of a 15-year-old boy, forcibly becoming a man in the course of a single day.

Neither point is labored and events move swiftly along in a nimbus of historic color and detail. The reader always knows which turnpike he has reached without being too heavily forewarned, at the same time, of precisely what action is coming up next. When the curtain rises for the juvenile Adam Cooper, who can't understand why...