SOURCE: “Boundless Love: Sometimes Mother is Another Word for Smother,” in Chicago Tribune Books, January 11, 1987, p. C6.

In the following review, Birkerts offers a positive evaluation of Anywhere but Here.

In the opening scene of Mona Simpson's Anywhere but Here, 12-year-old Ann August stands at the edge of a flat Western highway, watching with growing panic as her mother's white Continental turns into a dot on the horizon. Car and mother will reappear, but only after the girl is convinced that this time they are gone forever. For Adele, the mother, is an engineer of histrionic effects: she is willing to put Ann through the terrors of abandonment again and again in order to offer her the miracle of rescue.

Adele and Ann are on their way to California. Adele is in flight from a collapsed marriage and a constricting life in Bay City, Wis. Young, pretty, dissatisfied...