Lavin's fiction cannot be placed alongside the best from other cultures, but it can be seen, at full maturity in a few stories, as a quietly respectable contribution to the mainstream narrative action of the Irish story. That fictional technique is not at all like the tendency in the great novels of Joyce, Beckett or O'Brien to lyricize itself through poetry into some grand design which creates out of the minutest parts cosmological and metaphysical schemes of reality…. Miss Lavin's fiction shows more respect for the anecdotal rather than the poetic….

[In "The Green Grave and the Black Grave" and "The Great Wave,"] a remarkable ritualistic texture and sensitivity to poetic dialogue make wrong symbols out of the sea and its simple followers. The men and women of these stories are like Synge's tragic folk; their knowledge of suffering and love is unequal to ordinary conversation, but it...