A year spent by [Piers Paul Read] in America seems to have tempted him into writing [The Professor's Daughter, a] low-keyed, unexciting account of the generation gap and revolution in American society. The approach—dutiful, lucid, schematic—simply does not match the theme, and the final liberal humanist retreat into a reactionary family-stability solution ('a family will always be the basic unit of society') hands us an old stone where new bread was never more needed. The Professor's Daughter begins well but soon becomes predictable.