SOURCE: Coles, Joanna. “Against Her Will?” Times Literary Supplement (6–12 October 1989): 1104.

In the following excerpt, Coles asserts that Waverly Place is poorly written and oversimplifies the issues raised by the Steinberg murder case, observing that the novel sensationalizes the sad events of a true-life story.

Last year Joel Steinberg, a New York barrister, and Hedda Nussbaum, an ex-children's book editor, illegally adopted two children and murdered one of them—a six-year-old girl. Both Nussbaum and the child, it emerged, had been subjected to brutal beatings by Steinberg over a long period. The United States was horrified: not least by the couple's bad grace in committing such a crime in an apartment on West 10th Street. Susan Brownmiller lived just round the corner, and was inspired to write her first novel, Waverly Place. “It couldn't have happened here” (that is among rich, white people), she writes in her foreword. “But...