SOURCE: Haskell, Molly. “Race and Reunion.” New Leader 83, no. 2 (May-June 2000): 33-4.

In the following review, Haskell asserts that the racial situations in Half a Heart are at times unbelievable and the characters are occasionally unsympathetic, but notes that Brown's most effective depictions are of the bonds between family members.

Rosellen Brown's best-selling novel, Before and After (1992), describes the devastating effect on a family when the teenage son accidentally kills his girlfriend and becomes a fugitive from justice. But the title could serve most of her novels, focusing as they do on a cataclysmic event that spotlights family tensions and radically changes things forever, like red dye poured into a colorless liquid.

In the exquisite and wrenching Tender Mercies (1978), the husband has virtually cut his wife in half in a motorboat accident, a horrifyingly literal enactment of a cleavage both physical and psychological as well as temporal. In Civil...