["Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object"] has the style, wit, and intuitions of intelligent writing; happily it lacks the archness that the title suggests.

"Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object" is an exploration of love and of its failures and absences. At age 27, Olly Bax becomes a widow when her husband Sam, often injured and accident-prone, goes boating in a storm and drowns….

In fact Olly and Sam have had one of those marriages in which the participants are more like siblings than lovers, in which the emotional attachment is affection rather than passion. She is forced to acknowledge this more quickly by her loss, grief, and retrospection than she would have been if the marriage had played out its "natural" and inevitably disastrous course….

Olly uses her mourning period to figure out how she wants to live. She does seem to get more practical help—e.g., an apartment in New York City, a job, a stint at a musicians' colony in New Hampshire—than most of us could reasonably hope for. And a terrific love affair, including one of those idyllic rainy weekends making love, eating, reading, being ecstatic. But who would begrudge it to her?

Especially since Olly has done a lot of hard work observing and thinking. It is her sensibility which informs the book, and hers is an interesting one….

Laurie Colwin has a keen ear and a talent for rendering individual and particular ways of speaking. Similarly her heroine is sensitive to the uses of language….

In learning to deal with complexities, to take important risks, Olly moves more fully into adulthood and its difficult pleasures: work, friendship, passion.