It may be almost always true that if you give a child a bad home you will get an adult who has got problems. But Susan Richards Shreve, in her second novel [A Woman Like That], treats it as a truth so luminous that no one is going to worry about the exact nature of cause and effect….

The plot itself is not, I think, too implausible…. But there are too many steps left out between the messed-up childhood and the messed-up adult. It is never quite clear why Emily was so frightened of making relationships. Was she afraid of being like her mother? Or did she feel that to love another man would be to abandon her father, as her mother so often did? Or was she afraid of the possessive nature created by her dispossessed childhood? All these things are suggested—and all could be true...