SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Fee, Fie, Fo, Fum.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (10 May 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder criticizes The Everlasting Story of Nory, asserting that the book fails in its attempt to depict the perspective and language of a nine-year-old girl.

As a child late in the last century, Daisy Ashford assumed a grown-up's voice—or her notion of one—to write the romance of Ethel Montacue and her admirer, Mr. Salteena. In its comic misapprehensions of tone, likelihood and spelling, “The Young Visiters,” unearthed years later by J. M. Barrie, became a minor English classic.

Nicholson Baker has reversed the displacement. The Everlasting Story of Nory uses his notion of a child's voice to depict a 9-year-old American girl spending a year with her family in England. Baker's fertile shape-changing and playfulness of language do a lot to suggest a 9-year-old's butterfly speculations. Yet his venture...