[2] The novel focuses on Stark shedding personal ties to find her "true self" in a political cause: fighting apartheid as a civil rights lawyer.
[1] Her decisions also affect her friends, a Black African family who had lived in political exile: Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma.
[3] LA Times reviewer Richard Eder focused on the novel's political novel features, describing the novel as having hints of "Animal Farm foreboding".
New York Times Books reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote a lukewarm review, describing the novel as successfully profiling Grodimer's "psychological insight" while "the attempt in these pages to render a more realistic post-apartheid South Africa frequently feels pat and contrived."
(emphasis original)[1] Publishers Weekly was generally positive, describing the novel as "occasionally overdetermined by too many parallels and patterns, Gordimer's novel is powerfully complex and startling in its insights.