"The Waters of Kronos" is an enchanted book….

I have found it, too, a deeply moving book, and I believe that many readers similarly will find it speaks to them directly and affectingly with a peculiarly personal appeal.

Conrad Richter remains too little recognized for what he of a certainty is—one of the finest creative talents in American fiction….

He has stood alone in his creative use of historical materials, in the working—in his own phrase—of "those slender veins of golden metal that still remain" of the American past.

In "The Waters of Kronos" he turns the same practiced skills to a purpose achieved with more difficulty—the mining of the world of his own youth. The reader is immersed with him in a town at the turn of the present century, "peopled with the multitudinous, imaginary forms" of his past. I know of nothing comparable to it among American novels. In the whole range of American writing of which I have any knowledge, perhaps the nearest approach in quality and theme is Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town."

In Mr. Richter's novel it is given to John Donner to re-enter the world of his youth. Out of his deep "yearning for many things vanished," he is able to return, keeping his later knowledge of the worth and sweetness of all those things which in their time he had counted but little….

Shining with this heightened awareness, the re-creation of the past is marvelously evocative….

But for John Donner this is a journey of discovery into greater depths than to talk on a summer evening of a time lost and gone…. He is driven, "back here at the source," to seek answers to questions which had become increasingly insistent to him with his years. (pp. 1, 11)

The novel closes with John Donner's sure conviction that he will meet his mother "tomorrow," and that with their meeting will come fuller knowledge and understanding. The reader can only hope that the story of John Donner's search will be carried forward into this tomorrow in a further volume. (p. 11)