SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “The Dollhouse.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (29 March 1998): 2.

In the following review, Eder offers a positive assessment of The Short History of a Prince, praising the novel's “sympathy and nerve.”

If you are William and the world won't accept you as William and you have to keep fighting so that it will, then what do you call yourself once it does? The question stirs uneasily within what is conveniently known as gay fiction; it is one that Jane Hamilton—married to an apple grower and mother of two—explores with sympathy and nerve.

Hamilton, author of The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, writes hard novels beautifully. In The Short History of a Prince, she tries to see beyond what, in the first full literary generation, has tended understandably to show itself as a kind of gay exceptionalism.

Her valiant and precarious...