The reviews for The Wheel of Love were good, though some reviewers had reservations. Writing for Publishers Weekly, Barbara Bannon is effusive in her praise, claiming The Wheel of Love "May well be Joyce Carol Oates's finest collection of short stories yet . . . the effects on the reader are apt to linger long after he has finished the individual stories." A reviewer for Kirkus Reviews writes, "These rich, intent stories . . . have the supra-reality of the bleak hours before dawn as Miss Oates' characters, taut with awareness, suffer the last turn on the wheel of love." In a somewhat mixed review for The New York Times Book Review, Richard Gilman calls "Four Summers" one of the best stories in the collection, remarking that it "create[s] a verbal excitement, a sense of language used not for the expression of previously attained insights or perceptions but for new imaginative...