SOURCE: Caputi, Jane. “Stranger than Fiction.” Women's Review of Books 6, no. 8 (May 1989): 10–11.

In the following review, Caputi comments that Waverly Place is less powerful and effective than accounts of the real-life circumstances of the Steinberg murder case reported by the news media.

On November 1st, 1987, six-year-old Lisa Steinberg was brought to a hospital emergency room, unconscious and with injuries which led to her death four days later. The two people who had been raising her in their Waverly Place, Greenwich Village apartment—Joel Steinberg, a con artist and lawyer who had illegally adopted the child, and Hedda Nussbaum, the former children's book editor he lived with and battered for some twelve years—were brought in by the police for questioning. At first both were charged with second-degree murder, but the prosecution later dropped the charges against Nussbaum so that she could become the state's key witness. The trial...