SOURCE: A review of On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon, in America, Vol. 180, No. 1, January 2-9, 1999, pp. 17-8.

In the following review, Fisher discusses Gibbons's On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon in terms of its relationship with the author's other works.

During her brief career, Kaye Gibbons has earned an impressive number of literary and popular honors—awards and grants from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts, as well as the tribute of having two novels featured by Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. This wide acclaim stems from her ability to find comedy in tragedy and moral beauty in ugliness. All of her novels draw life from her unflinching honesty, her foregrounding of hatred and violence and their destructive consequences.

Many of Gibbons's novels employ first-person narrators disempowered in some way—through childhood...