Because "Girl" and several other Kincaid stories had first been published in the influential magazine The New Yorker, when Kincaid's collection At the Bottom of the River came out in 1983 it attracted more critical attention than volumes of short stories usually do, particularly for a writer's first book. Early reviewers were drawn to the language of the stories, though some were put off by the overall obscurity. Anne Tyler, writing for The New Republic, praised the stories for Kincaid's "care for language, joy in the sheer sound of words, and evocative power." Edith Milton, in The New York Times Book Review, also cited the language, "which is often beautifully simple, [and] also adopts a gospel-like seriousness, reverberating with biblical echoes and echoes of biblical echoes." Both writers commented briefly on "Girl" and its theme of the mother-daughter relationship, and David Leavitt, writing for The Village Voice...