[The Young in One Another's Arms] is a rather dreadful piece of writing, about a one-armed woman about to be evicted from the Vancouver boarding house which she owns and which has been marked down by urban renewal. Presumably Rule intends Vancouver in particular, and the society of North American cities in general, to stand for what Yeats calls "no country for old men." But the machine-ruled, police-run world she describes hardly does well by birds in the trees or by the young, either. She sees the stereotypes of her boarding house, related as they are by weakness and by the bonds of affection rather than by legal ties and blood lines, as a new, ideal version of the human family, and she traces their sailing to Byzantium, their flight from demolition to Galiano Island. The multi-racial, cosmo-sexual, four-generation structure of the new family unit is threatened from without by financial and political harassments, and from within, not surprisingly, by emotional crosscurrents. But the greatest threat comes, probably, from the author, who works at the relationships among members of her circle with the earnest manipulations of a twelve-year-old trying to describe how it all was among the counselors at summer camp. She is utterly determined that it will all be good, and that they are all nice people, as they vault from bed to bed and from mood to mood, without her seeming to understand exactly why they do it, but only to know that, for purposes of plot, or summer camp, they do do it. (pp. 261-62)

It is poignantly irritating to find Rule writing with the grave demeanor of someone sure of her own daring. She unfurls her vista of the free life and open sexuality to reveal a homey landscape halfway between Woolf in Bloomsbury and William Morris in Nowhere. Rule's trouble is that she is much too conscious of her didactic purpose; she builds her new society to serve as an example of how to eschew the flaws of ordinary family relationships. But then eschewing such flaws, something which can be done very nicely in the heads of adolescents packing mentally for a Better World, is not really a very convincing mode for personal survival, either in fact, or in fiction written for anyone over thirteen. (p. 262)