SOURCE: "Love-Letter to Seattle," in The Saturday Review of Literature, New York, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, January 27, 1945, p. 24.

In the following review of Great Son, Rothman praises Ferber's skill as a novelist but laments the fact that she did not fully develop her story in this novel.

Miss Ferber is a swell writer, gifted, fertile, and imaginative. And she is unfair to book reviewers. Here she has written a lively contemporary American romance, with certain inadequacies plain upon the face of it. We are prepared to speak to her in pained and loving accents. But right before us, in nice large type, is a two-page introduction in which she has ticked off these very inadequacies, neatly, clinically, and without omission. Absolutely unfair. We hope this is not the signal for a new trend of self-reviewed novels. Probably few novelists could give so accurate an account of their own work...