Now In November: 276 (VMC) - Tapa blanda

Very beautiful prose, simple yet bright with imagery and so distinctive that one could mistake no single paragraph for the work of any other writer. Johnson belongs in the tradition of Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson (NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW)

It is a book that sings (NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE)

Perhaps it is her obvious radical sympathies that have kept Johnson's novel of dustbowl and depression from being a key text of 20th-century American literature, or perhaps it is that after this Pulitzer Prize-winning debut, Johnson struggled to meet expectations and failed. When working on the novel, she was aware of 'the great flood of books already published', but was confident that her story of how the Wall Street Crash and drought affect one family needed to be told. Her young narrator picks the turning points in her family's misfortunes without over-labouring her portents. The dynamics between parents and daughters and the squabble between siblings are as carefully laid out as the ill omens, such as the shooting of a family dog. Johnson evokes the charms of a character poised on the brink of the adult world yet still bounded by childish concerns, and anchors her story firmly in a landscape that is equal to any of her characters (GUARDIAN UNLIMITED)

There is a kinship between Katherine Mansfield and Josephine Johnson (ELIZABETH HART)