SOURCE: A review of The Thorn Birds, in Commonweal, July 22, 1977, pp. 473-5.

In the following review, Kroll commends McCullough's "touching" romantic world view and prose, but criticizes the excessive scope of The Thorn Birds and its monotonous passages.

By now almost everyone will have heard of The Thorn Birds. How Colleen McCullough wrote it at the rate of fifteen thousand words a night, once did thirty thousand in a sitting, finally produced a manuscript of a thousand pages weighing ten pounds. How the decision-makers at Harper & Row—the trade chief, the marketing director, the subsidiary rights director—took the manuscript home for the weekend and realized they had to go all out. How the Literary Guild snapped it up as their June selection and, in an incredible auction among paperback publishers, Avon Books paid a record-setting $1.9 million for the paperback reprint rights.

All of this is enough to...