SOURCE: Johnston, Darcie Conner. “A Crack Across Their Lives.” Belles Lettres 8, no. 2 (winter 1992): 31, 39.

In the following review, Johnston praises the subject matter and execution of storyline in Before and After.

Like a renegade comet, near-shattering violence careens into the lives of the ordinary people who populate the novels of Rosellen Brown, slamming them off course and in directions they never imagined. In Tender Mercies (1978), for example, a swimming accident destroys the vigor of a young woman who will be paralyzed for life, and Civil Wars (1984) portrays two children forced to cope with the death of their parents. “Many people have a kind of crack across their lives,” Brown explains—some tragedy that divides their existence into the before and the after. Before and After, Brown's fourth and latest novel, opens with the riveting discovery of a teenage girl beaten to death along a snowy stretch of New Hampshire...