What is important and good in ["Restless Is the River"] lies in the interwoven background details, incidents not so much personal as communal. These facets of land development, with attendant intrigues and none too savory politics … are necessary to a full picture of the era. Pervasively beautiful, slower to change, are the turning seasons on the prairie itself. But because of the non-selective, diffuse, sometimes lush writing (half as long, the book might be more effective) the significant is often lost among the insignificant, the good color of reality robbed by the synthetically romantic. For the authenticity of its background material, however, and its truly epic score, "Restless Is the River" may well be commended.

Ruth Lechlitner, in a review of "Restless Is the River," in New York Herald Tribune Books, October 15, 1939, p. 12.