SOURCE: A review of A Family Likeness, and Other Stories, and The Stories of Mary Lavin Vol. 3, in British Book News, February, 1986, pp. 110-11.

[In the review below, Brown comments favorably on Lavin's talents as a short-story writer.]

Mary Lavin is a superb storyteller. She has the capacity to take an apparently ordinary, even banal, situation and to compress within the few pages of her short story an entirely credible small world. Such is the honesty and reality of her creation that we believe in the lives led by her characters both before and after the incidents that make up the core of the story she tells us about them. Not only has she a sensitive insight into the human condition but she also shows an appreciation of the beauty of the countryside in which many of her stories are set. She writes about contemporary people, involved in...