SOURCE: A review of Tara Road, in World Literature Today, Vol. 74, No. 1, Winter, 2000, p. 72.

In the following review, Lanters offers a mixed assessment of Tara Road, faulting the novel for not being emotionally or intellectually challenging.

The dust jacket describes Tara Road as “a moving story rendered with the deft touch of a master artisan”—a reasonably fair assessment of a book which ranks somewhere between a classy soap opera and a romance novel, complete with gratuitous fortune-telling gypsy woman. The main part of the story revolves around two women, one American, one Irish, in whose lives unexpected tragedy has struck. Marilyn, the American, has become emotionally estranged from her husband since they lost their teenage son to a motorcycle accident; Ria, the Dubliner, had believed herself happily married until her husband left her for his much younger, pregnant girlfriend. On something of a whim, the women decide...