[In the following excerpt, Grossman lauds the authenticity of place in Quindlen's Object Lessons but criticizes the author's tendency to put everything in order at the end of the novel.]

The girl child, a heroine of strong character and candid speech, has been a presence in fiction ever since Jane Eyre and Alice in Wonderland. And these two first novels by Deirdre McNamer and by New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen demonstrate her perennial vitality, just at a moment when the psychological studies of Carol Gilligan and others are focusing on a peak in girls' self-confidence that precedes the clamping-down of social and cultural pressures at puberty. In the tradition of a sharing of subjects and insights between fiction and psychology, Rima in the Weeds and Object Lessons each celebrate a child's freedom—and each in a different way makes her confront the problem of the adult woman's confinement in a world of men.

Anna Quindlen's central character, thirteen-year-old Maggie Scanlon, asserts her autonomy by defining a territory separate from that of Connie, her mother: “The house belonged to Connie. Kenwood, with its scuffed baseball field and its narrow creek and its ring of tousled fields, was Maggie's home.” As much wilderness as this Westchester neighborhood allows, she claims for herself. The eldest child of a love-match between her beautiful Italian mother and rebellious Irish father, Maggie is an explorer of boundaries, ethnic as well as geographical. Her father's wealthy tribe of relatives looks down on her mother, but old John Scanlon, its tyrannical patriarch, has chosen Maggie as his favorite grandchild: he sets out both to charm her and to initiate her into his family power-games, thus driving mother and daughter even farther apart.

A crisis comes when the old man suffers a stroke, and in the last weeks of his life attempts to coerce Maggie's family into line, demanding that her father, Tommy, join the family business and that they all move into a house adjacent to his own. Connie, resisting the move and suspecting her husband may ultimately give way, starts a flirtation with a man from her old neighborhood who is teaching her how to drive. Meanwhile, caught in the middle, Maggie escapes at night to join a group of kids who play at arson in the new development nearby.

The narrative, though at times awkwardly slowed by flashbacks, is rich in circumstantial detail. Characters pick their way through an ethnically and economically hyper-conscious social minefield: Connie is shown learning to revise her best-occasion outfit from red satin and sweetheart neckline to navy linen sheath, under silent pressure from her cut-glass Irish sisters-in-law. Ruling them all is John Scanlon, deploying his armament of pronouncements: “Property values over there will land in the toilet. Sheenies to the right of you. Sheenies to the left of you.” There's also an authentic feel to the places in Maggie's world: her grandmother's mauve-brocade living room, and the old-fashioned plantings of hollyhocks and Rose of Sharon in the cemetery her grandfather maintains.

In the last 50 pages of the novel, however, Anna Quindlen succumbs to the temptation to set too much in order. A chain of suspicious coincidences leads to a dual discovery: Maggie's of her mother's boyfriend, Connie's of Maggie's participation in an episode of fire-starting. This brings everyone to their senses. Connie renews her commitment to her marriage (blissfully, thanks to the empowerment her new driver's license has given her); she then lies to the police to protect Maggie from the arson investigation, thus drawing her daughter back into the fold. Finally, the old tyrant's death releases a mood of general benignity, and Maggie and her mother celebrate their shared femininity as the latest family shotgun wedding goes forward.