SOURCE: Rogers, Byron. “The Importance of Being Parsley.” Spectator 280, no. 8851 (28 March 1998): 29.

In the following review, Rogers argues that, despite its engaging thesis, the impact of Other People's Children is lessened by the novel's weak plot and Trollope's unusual emphasis on cooking and kitchens as a measure of character.

Behind this book [Other People's Children] is a Good Idea. Nothing wrong with that: other novels have been successfully based on a writer's discovery of a Good Idea, like the dramatic potential of slavery or the effect of further education on the Victorian rural poor. It is just that at some point you do need to become more interested in the characters, and in what happens to them, than in the Good Idea. That should fall away like the armature around a Saturn Five. And here it doesn't.

Joanna Trollope's Good Idea is the prediction that by the year 2010 there...