For her seventh and most poetically written novel [Braided Lives], Marge Piercy has chosen a subject often tapped by women in their first books—growing up in the '50s without becoming conventional or going mad….

Piercy gives up-to-date glimpses of her characters' lives in italicized passages, showing the beginning and the fruits of their political growth. She leaves the time in between, when ostensibly each went through great upheavals, to the reader's imagination. Piercy's previous works fill in the gap; she has made such changes her primary concern. Her power as a novelist, however, rests in her ability to present feminist radical politics in the context of a riveting story, and she hasn't really done that here.

The flash-forward biographical tidbits are tantalizing, for the events alluded to are fresher than those covered in more depth. They are, though, too sketchy to provide a satisfying picture of the characters "today." For example, after a horrifying account of Jill's self-induced abortion, Piercy offers in italics the information that she subsequently set up an illegal abortion service. A more complete and dramatic presentation of this later organizing effort would have had great power, and particular political relevance now.

But these pieces of the future elevate the predictable episodes of the '50s from the ghetto of personal experience to the foundations of the feminist realpolitik. Piercy has, shrewdly or unconsciously, used a revisionist process in choosing what to present; each scene obviously is a spark for later political development. Jill is taken through a series of unsatisfying and degrading relationships, but their importance becomes clear only when we are told, in italics, that she went through a period of rejecting men before finally accepting the love of a truly caring man.

In this novel, for the first time, Piercy presents her older characters in more than a perfunctory way, and uses her flash-forward technique, though to a lesser extent, to demonstrate growth in them as well….

Because we don't witness the personal and political transformations of the characters, with all the doubts and backsliding entailed, the struggle to reach enlightenment seems deceptively easy, and life after revelation unrealistically sweet. But this makes Braided Lives the most positive of Piercy's works—the only one in which she holds out hope for personal fulfillment.