SOURCE: “Two Women in Search of the American Dream,” in Washington Post Book World, February 1, 1987, p. 7.

In the following review, Ward offers praise for Anywhere but Here.

Strong-minded young women have been a staple of American fiction since at least Louisa May Alcott; Willa Cather, Harper Lee, Carson McCullers and Ellen Gilchrist, among others, have all contributed to the forging of a kind of feminine Huck Finn tradition. Now, making a very impressive debut as a novelist, Mona Simpson adds an original character of her own to the line. Yet Ann August, vital as she is, generates only half the novel's energy; for, as the opening sentence (“We fought.”) bluntly announces, this is the story of two determined women, a portrait of a mother-daughter relationship as tangled and ambivalent as Electra's with Clytemnestra.

It also offers a version of a number of more recent, and peculiarly American, myths...