SOURCE: A review of A Pagan Place, in New York Times Book Review, May 3, 1970, pp. 5, 31.

In the following review, Donoghue maintains that A Pagan Place is an "interesting" and "pleasant" novel, but does not "go deep" enough to merit consideration as a significant work of literature.

[A Pagan Place] is a novel in the guise of a memoir. An Irish girl, now a nun in Brussels, recalls her childhood, her family, the neighbors, holy and pagan Ireland officially neutral in the years of World War II, a trip to Dublin in search of an erring sister. No occasion is too trivial to be invoked, a nun's dedication to God being apparently compatible with the exercise of an emigrant's total recall. The degree of accuracy is presumably high, though Portarlington is remembered as Port Darlington, and Kinnegad as Kenigad. The heroine is a country girl, but not a peasant...