Baldur's Gate effectively creates a felt world. The village of Jordan, its people, houses, and landscape, is masterfully drawn. (p. 106)

The separate strands of [the narrator's] story, which coil like creepers around the trellis of her mind, lead, at times, to considerable excitement, but her narrative mannerisms are occasionally capricious and distracting. She has a habit of alluding to past events without describing or explaining them; the scene in which her mother publicly brought disgrace on the family, for instance, constantly hovers around the fringes of Eva's narration but is not fully presented until the final pages of the novel. Since Eva is elsewhere all too willing to digress, often within digressions, her selective reticence seems more obfuscatory than esthetic. Other lapses, including a long passage of what may be the least plausible teenage dialogue ever written and a wholly improbable account of a television crew's visit to Jordan, require great patience, but Baldur's Gate is a serious novel that ultimately rewards such patience. (pp. 106-07)