SOURCE: A review of A Family Likeness and Other Stories and The Stories of Mary Lavin, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 170-71.

[In the following review, Peterson remarks on the themes of Lavin's stories and praises them as "remarkably insightful and intimate."]

With the publication of A Family Likeness and Other Stories and the third volume of The Stories of Mary Lavin, Constable has something new and something old for Mary Lavin readers.

While a new collection of short stories by a writer of major reputation in the genre is bound to excite her readers, a volume of previously collected stories can be equally interesting and even more satisfying if the stories are among the writer's best. The third volume of Stories does have the virtue of containing several of Mary Lavin's finest short stories, though it suffers from the same quirks of selection...