SOURCE: “The Lure of the Bright Lights,” in Washington Post Book World, May 27, 1984, p. 11.

In the following review, Perrin offers a positive assessment of Bridgeport Bus, praising Howard's treatment of the theme of personal transformation.

Mary Agnes Keeley, 35 years old, 5 feet 11 inches tall, thin as a pencil, lives with her widowed mother in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Her father, a Bridgeport fireman, died when she was 15. Right after high school she went to work to help put her brother through Fordham. He is now an FBI agent, assigned to the Buffalo, New York, office, with a wife and three children. Mary Agnes is secretary to the president of Standard Zipper in Bridgeport. She is a virgin. She is also on the edge of martyrdom to her mother, a natural genius at using guilt feelings and ill health to control her children.

That martyrdom does not occur. Instead this novel does...