SOURCE: Review of In the Red Kitchen, by Michèle Roberts. Contemporary Review 257, no. 494 (July 1990): 56.

In the following review, the critic observes that In the Red Kitchen contains richly descriptive prose but comments that the different narrative voices in the novel are confusing.

In Michèle Roberts's novel [In the Red Kitchen] four main characters narrate episodes in their respective stories. They range from an ancient Egyptian woman to one who lives in present day Hackney. By various devices their stories interrelate in unexpected, not to say contrived, ways until the final complication involves the question of whether the connections related by Hattie, the ‘king pin’ of the sequence, is inventing relationships or telling what she sees as the truth about the various plots. Flora, a working class London girl, is used by a distinguished scientist for amorous experiments of his own as well as for his genuine...