SOURCE: “Daughters of the South,” in Women's Review of Books, Vol. 11, No. 1, October, 1993, p. 24.

In the following review, Cohen discusses the Southern women in Gibbons's Charms for the Easy Life, Pam Durban's The Laughing Place, and Elizabeth Berg's Durable Goods.

Sensitive daughters and powerful parents are the focus of these three recent Southern novels. Charlie Kate, part folk-healer, part-scientist, the North Carolina grandmother in Kaye Gibbons' fourth novel, Charms for the Easy Life, defies labels as she rises off the page. Louise Vess, the mother in Pam Durban's first novel, The Laughing Place, is a formidable figure with upper-class aspirations and stiff upper lip, thwarted by the small universe of Timmons, South Carolina. In Durable Goods, Elizabeth Berg's first novel, set on a Texas military base, it's an abusive father who looms large. Though all three daughter-narrators are both blessed and cursed by these powerful parent figures, Gibbons'...