Before finishing the first chapter of [Mad Shadows], I had that sinking feeling all composition teachers have experienced reading the intensely subjective outpourings of an adolescent mind. But by the time I had read half of the book, I was caught in the world created by the author's nineteen-year-old imagination. She had proved the validity of Conrad's stricture on the Romantic sensibility, that it must "in the destructive element immerse". Miss Blais has plunged into her nature and written a parable out of what she discovered there. Like other figurative narratives, this novel can be understood on more than one level. (pp. 72-3)

Freud, for instance, would appreciate the mother's love for her idiot son, and the daughter's hatred of both, not to mention her idealization of her dead father: "Far off in her childhood, she could see her father, the austere peasant, the maker of bread. When he tilled the virgin loins of the earth, he was penetrating to the heart of God." The daughter's concern with the farm and with making bread become in this light perhaps a little too obvious, as are many of the motifs that run through the novel. But like Emily Brontë, though Miss Blais may tell, she never explains. As a result Mad Shadows has the convincing irrationality and vivid detail of a dream (and dreams are frequently mentioned in it). Fortunately it also has an imagistic complexity and unity of purpose which elevate it to the realm of art. Its many striking scenes convince, not as having been recreated from observed outer reality, but as having been created for the first time from felt inner reality. (p. 73)

[The images used in the novel] interweave in patterns controlled by an imagination which the sympathetic reader must admire. Striking and readable, Mad Shadows is an impressive first novel. (p. 74)