SOURCE: “The Great Pretenders: Maeve Binchy's Vivid Family of Characters,” in Washington Post Book World, September 11, 1989, p. D3.

In the following positive review, Dooley lauds Binchy's characterization in Silver Wedding.

[In Silver Wedding,] Desmond Doyle, meek and mild and married almost 25 years to Deirdre O'Hagan, remembers a promise he made to her. He would be a success, he had vowed. He would show her stiff-necked and proper Dublin parents that a poor boy from a stony farm in the west of Ireland could make good.

He hadn't, of course, though they pretended he had. They pretended also that their son Brendan hadn't fled the suburban house outside London to return to the impoverished beauty of the family farm, and pretended that their daughter, Helen, was a member of a convent rather than hovering on the edges of the religious community, banging away to get in.

For all those...