SOURCE: Jacobs, Rita D. Review of Back When We Were Grownups, by Anne Tyler. World Literature Today 76, no. 2 (spring 2002): 154.

In the following review, Jacobs claims that although Back When We Were Grownups is a good read, it is not one of Tyler's best novels.

Anne Tyler's characters can be so familiar and so fully imagined and presented that reading a Tyler novel is a bit like visiting with the family down the road, albeit a family with many quirks. in Back When We Were Grownups Rebecca Davitch, a fifty-three-year-old grandmother who runs a catering business, The Open Arms, in her home, is trying to make sense of her past and define her future against the backdrop of fashioning celebrations of life's events for strangers.

Rebecca is left alone after her husband's death to deal with three grown stepdaughters and one grown daughter of her own. The plot is...