[In "Arabian Days"] Miss O'Brien picks her way through the debris of progress and the buildings that are like boxes waiting to be filled with the gifts of the future. She asks her shrewd and interested questions and few are willing to admit that there are, as yet, no answers. The women will not even tell her their dreams, which she asks for after every other inquiry has failed. Miss O'Brien is the only one of them who is not masked, but to anyone who knows her other books, it will seem that this is not a novel situation for her. (p. C9)

Anatole Broyard, in The New York Times (© 1978 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), June 27, 1978.

In her novels, O'Brien's mannered, almost curdled, passionate style is usually set off by meticulous honesty. But in [the dozen short stories in The Rose in the Heart...