SOURCE: Dorris, Michael. “Finding Truth as Death Looms.” Los Angeles Times (25 August 1994): E6.

In the following review, Dorris lauds Quindlen's One True Thing for its interesting plot and satisfying ending.

What a treat to read a good story told by a smart, if not always likable, narrator. We meet Ellen Gulden, the young woman at the heart of Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Anna Quindlen's provocative second novel [One True Thing] (the best-selling Object Lessons was her first), soon after she's graduated from Harvard and taken a magazine job in New York.

The brightest and eldest of three children, she has always seen herself and been seen by others as her English professor father's clone—literate, ironic, ambitious—rather than her homemaker mother's daughter. Her life to date has been one academic triumph after another, your basic 99 percentile on the SATs type-A personality. She's used to being in control, used...