"Kind Are Her Answers" is a slighter and shallower book than "Promise of Love"; more entertaining, perhaps, but less moving. Mary Renault remains an exceedingly talented and promising novelist, but she has not, since her first book, progressed in any way….

[There] is room for shrewd comedy in "Kind Are Her Answers," plus a rueful and gentle irony. Christie, though maddening, is a completely charming character. One sees why Kit can never escape from her. Again, the incidentals of the story are touched off with great effectiveness…. "Kind Are Her Answers" is, in short, a clever and diverting story as well as one which knows what it is talking about when it discusses the course and fluctuation of passion. Only it is not quite what one had expected of Miss Renault. There is no depth to it, no real feeling. Something is missing which "Promise of Love" had. "Kind Are Her Answers" is eminently readable, but it smacks a little too much of the run-of-the-mine English novel.

The early part of ["The Friendly Young Ladies"], a study of adolescence, or at any rate of a seventeen-year-old with a good deal of the arrested child in her make-up, is of a nice analytical delicacy and seems altogether just in psychological tone….

[The plotting] is cleverly and acutely done. The analysis of motive is, perhaps, too constant, and the comic passages tend to become a trifle mechanical because of the author's trick of humorous exaggeration. But there is much that compels admiration…. Miss Renault says some shrewd things, too, and sometimes says them very well. So soon as the scene is transferred, however, to Leo's houseboat on the Thames a mist of metropolitan sophistication begins to rise and spread over everything…. There are some good moments still to come, but the amorous complications and subtleties of emotion in which Leo, Helen, Joe and Peter are involved take the stuffing out of the tale. Miss Renault has many gifts, but as yet seems unable, except in flashes, to use them with restraint and imaginative sincerity.