SOURCE: A review of The Girls, in The New Republic, Vol. XXIX, No. 370, January 4, 1922, pp. 158-59.

In the following mixed review of The Girls, Hackett applauds the realistic details of the plot and characters, but faults Ferber's "underlying sentimentalism and snappy technique."

At one time it looked as if nothing could drag Chicago into the focus of the novelist. It wasn't simply that Chicago didn't want to sit, in all its sprawling horror: it was also that the artist shrank from touching Chicago. Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, H. B. Fuller, Robert Herrick, Edith Wyatt—each of them roped the beast and yanked him forward, but there was a felt resistance and a not quite happy conquest. The sitter and the artist both remained, if not uncomfortable, certainly heroically strained.

Miss Ferber marks a difference. She is not in the least strained. Chicago to her is one of the...