SOURCE: Craig, Patricia. “Non-Eater.” London Review of Books 14, no. 23 (3 December 1992): 28.

In the following review, Craig criticizes Daughters of the House as “overwrought” and comments that Roberts is “one of those writers who equate obscurity with depth.”

Jenefer Shute's Life-Size comes garnished with a quote from Fay Weldon, in which enthusiasm has got the better of taste: ‘Terrific! I devoured it at a sitting.’ ‘Devour’ is not a word one would choose to apply to a novel about the suppression of appetites, however jocularly. This book is full of rage and disgust. ‘They say I'm sick, but what about them, all of them, who think nothing of chewing on a carcass, sinking their teeth into muscle and gristle and blood?’ Thus muses the first-person narrator of Life-Size, five foot two inches, weighing less than seventy pounds; Josie, a graduate student in economics, is far advanced along the line of...