The [characters’] common fate is loneliness and their common destiny is of course death. Most of [the book], taking place as it does, in a winding sheet of materia morbida and moribunda is intentionally repetitive and disconsolate even where Miss Frame's particularly sympathetic awareness of rejection and negation make it more bearable than it might seem and even where she asserts the human need and right to survival. Still it will be a hard-won triumph for the book as it was for all those who are afflicted and dispossessed in one way or another.