Honor Arundel's A Family Failing … seems to me … admirably justified in that young readers would not at the moment be able to find the same witty, perceptive discussion of some immediate, adolescent issues from other sources…. Miss Arundel … sails straight into an up-to-date treatment of communes, disenchantment with universities, disillusion over quarrelling parents, aggravated by the father's redundancy, with a sympathy and intelligence that is very appealing. A Family Failing, above all, is not that most dreary thing, a problem book. Rather it is about real people who have problems, but an independent existence of their own too. (p. 69)