SOURCE: "Lost and Found," in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 9, No. 385, January 12, 1996, pp. 38-9.

[Birch is a novelist. In the following highly favorable review, she praises Morrissy's characterization and thematic focus in Mother of Pearl, describing it as an "acute, elegiac first novel."]

In Mary Morrissy's acute, elegiac first novel [Mother of Pearl] she returns to territory familiar from her collection of stories, A Lazy Eye—illness, alienation, the emotional ambivalence of parenthood, the dangers of bargaining with God. There were one or two gems there, but even the most successful tended to suffer from a sense of having tried to do too much for the genre. With this novel, however, she spreads her wings.

Several writers have explored the theme of babysnatching in recent years but no one else has tackled it with quite so much sympathy and sophistication. This is an emotional minefield, but Morrissy is clear-sighted...