This is Marge Piercy's seventh novel, a fact that numerologists would have us believe augurs well for its success. A more substantial contribution to that success is the fact that Braided Lives is Piercy's best novel to date.

Those of us who have anticipated each of Piercy's offerings with increasing delight will not be disappointed; readers who are unfamiliar with Piercy's work but who enjoyed The Bell Jar or The Women's Room will need no further introduction to this novel. But the reader who has the most to gain in seeking out Piercy's work is the one to whom a blend of fiction and feminism seem anathema: Braided Lives offers a convincing and honest depiction of women's reality….

Braided Lives has a great deal to do with finding one's own voice, a personal style in life as well as art…. Just as Piercy gave us an unerring vision of the radical underground of the 1970's in Vida and of the alternative lifestyles of the 1960's in Small Changes, this novel is a pointed and unsentimental look at a decade that both taught women their place and set the stage for a reversal of that education.

Braided Lives is, above all, a novel of conscience. Its vision is direct and unclouded by nostalgia or apology for the way we were. The women in Braided Lives are complex and conflicted: the unfolding of their stories compels us to see how society—embodied in the family, schools, the workplace, and marriage—marks each of us. Piercy may not offer the same compassion in her depiction of the novel's male characters, but the villain here is not one individual or even a particular group but rather a system (call it sexism, although the term is never used here) that oppresses all those who accept its rules.

Piercy does not yield to the temptation of making the past over in light of the present but provides, in brief passages, the compassionate and knowing voice of the present-day Donna who, at the age of forty-three, lives a life that is content and whole. Donna is a survivor, and she chooses to examine her own past out of a strong commitment to the present….

The parallel voices of the young and middle-aged narrator remind us of how easily the hard-won advance of the women's movement—especially the availability of safe and legal abortion—may be jeopardized in a time of conservative reaction. Piercy does not flinch in her recital of a period that was both repressive to endure and painful to recall. But she also tells a story of personal courage and endurance, a statement about what some women and men have chosen to leave behind. That the journey back is honest and engaging is testament to Piercy's skill.