Marge Piercy will leave a … lasting mark with … Woman on the Edge of Time, although it is not a perfect book. There is nothing like a suburban condition for Piercy; she tackles concepts as large as femininity and temporality, and her work functions in extremes, polarities which conflict and crash to the sound of unmitigated suffering. Those collisions are captured in highly personal and sympathetic human portraits…. (p. 38)

Although jarring at times, the oppositions Piercy sets up between present and future, rich and poor, urban squalor and scientific pastoralism, imprisonment and freedom, never produce caricatures. In fact, her utopia is more believable and moving than many renderings of contemporary reality. Like a latter-day D. H. Lawrence, she sees the future as a revival of tradition, eternal values and human ritual…. The organic is stronger than the synthetic, the real invalidates what is fake, and community thus becomes a state of mind.

Manipulating time in the context of a Kesey-esque mental hospital, Piercy projects the ambiguity of whether reality or imagination is at work; she penetrates the relationship between science fiction and delusion. Woman on the Edge of Time addresses the possibilities of actuality and hallucination. Unfortunately, this gives her almost too many ideas—she has really written two books, the story of [her protagonist's] victimization and a feminist handbook for the 22nd century…. (p. 39)

Woman on the Edge of Time, expanding on the political consciousness of Piercy's other novels and offering a future, resembling something like the 1960s gone right instead of wrong, integrates and internalizes rhetoric by making it the subject matter of plot itself. And Piercy's people, crazy or imagined, are worth caring for. (p. 40)