Teeming with homilies and revelations, Children of Power is as moral a fiction as we've had in many a season….

When they are not being overburdened with epiphanies, Shreve's characters are utterly real…. The adolescents, who are caught between the grandiosity and the emptiness of their parents, are especially vividly drawn.

A past master of children's fiction, Shreve writes her most beguiling prose during the characters' many flashbacks to childhood. Her sentences become rhythmic, compact, and refreshingly undidactic…. It is the waning of childhood bedazzlement set against a Fifties backdrop of collapsing political and sexual relationships that makes Children of Power original, and strangely compelling.

Jack Sullivan, "Books in Brief: "Children of Power'," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1979 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. 6, No. 10, May 12, 1979, p. 47.