SOURCE: Brzezinski, Steve. Review of Half a Heart, by Rosellen Brown. Antioch Review 58, no. 4 (fall 2000): 525-26.

In the following review, Brzezinski compliments Brown's characterization and the situations that the protagonists must endure in Half a Heart.

Brown, the distinguished author of Tender Mercies and Civil Wars, returns in this new novel [Half a Heart] to her two most enduring thematic preoccupations: family relationships and the racial divide in America.

The novel is composed of two major sections. The first surrounds the search by former civil rights activist Miriam Viner, now an affluent Houston wife and mother of two, to find the daughter she conceived 18 years ago with Eljay, a politically militant black college professor in Mississippi, and reluctantly gave up. The second section involves the daughter, Ronnee, who for reasons of her own attempts to reconnect with her mother, culminating with Ronnee's decision to come to Houston to...