Joanne Greenberg's stories concern special cases, strangers in a crowd, people cut off by loneliness and misunderstanding from the abrasive but corrective contacts of their fellows….

Sometimes Mrs. Greenberg's stories veer toward tragedy, sometimes toward the comic. Happy endings are not outside her purview, though her best and longest story, the title story, "Rites of Passage" starts happily and takes a sudden sinister bend. It is a powerful tale, involving a "Macbeth"-like folie a deux, demonstrating yet once more the principle of division of responsibility, where one partner wills the illicit act, and the other performs it.

Mrs. Greenberg's locales are mainly rural, her backgrounds frequently ethnic. When her stories have John Cheever in their sights, they falter. When they favor Willa Cather, they gain in strength….

Joanne Greenberg is not afraid to risk sentimentality. Occasionally she achieves it. But more often she comes through as an authoritative voice claiming human status and human understanding for neglected pockets of experience, buried lives, half-forgotten isolates who live, too often, on the fringes of our inattention.