[In "Arabian Days"] Miss O'Brien picks her way through the debris of progress and the buildings that are like boxes waiting to be filled with the gifts of the future. She asks her shrewd and interested questions and few are willing to admit that there are, as yet, no answers. The women will not even tell her their dreams, which she asks for after every other inquiry has failed. Miss O'Brien is the only one of them who is not masked, but to anyone who knows her other books, it will seem that this is not a novel situation for her. (p. C9)

In her novels, O'Brien's mannered, almost curdled, passionate style is usually set off by meticulous honesty. But in [the dozen short stories in The Rose in the Heart] … she rarely has time to get real feelings fully wound up, and the style often oozes into self-parody. The sameness of theme doesn't help, either—mostly about middle-aged, lonely women making fleeting contacts that are never enough…. One story, "Starting," does seem fully warmed, not rushed: a divorcee meets a lovely, companionable, mature man, but can't stand to contemplate all the excitement and suspense of the start of a love affair; she'd rather come in somewhere in the middle, where it's already "as it was with her children, easy and silent and with an unutterable understanding." O'Brien, as anyone who knows her work will tell, is all heart—you can just about wring her out—but here that heart doesn't start pumping on such short notice; still, her fans will welcome this gathering of some previously uncollected favorites. (p. 1380)

Kirkus Reviews (copyright © 1978 The Kirkus Service, Inc.), December 15, 1978.