SOURCE: Foster, Aisling. “The Stepmother's Story.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4955 (20 March 1998): 23.

In the following review, Foster comments that Other People's Children marks another stage in Trollope's “evolution from escapist fiction into realism.”

Decorum is the backbone of Joanna Trollope's fiction. Her very English, middle-class characters live ordinary, well-meaning lives, until things begin to go wrong. Then, like the excellent Aga cooker with which these sagas are too often associated, the same solid individuals reserve the capacity to hurt and even scar the unwary. The ability to open the lid on pain raises Trollope's stories above the usual flush of heart-and-flower fiction. Indeed, with each one she publishes, the mood seems to darken. Her previous novel dealt with a suicide in the bleakly realized world of modern farming; this one digs into the “random and preoccupied nature of family life” and the trauma of second marriages. The mess which...