SOURCE: "Girl Meets Men," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 3,319, October 7, 1965, p. 893.

The following is a mixed assessment of August Is a Wicked Month.

A great deal of nonsense has been written in gossip columns and glossy magazines about Miss O'Brien as a militant spokesman of her sex, voicing in her new novel all the perplexity and private savagery said to be felt by women today. August is a Wicked Month seems, for this if no other reason, all set for a succès de scandale; and it would be foolish to pretend that the author's personality, or the topical titillation of her subject-matter, ought not to influence any so-called literary judgment of the book. Miss O'Brien is a naturally subjective writer, and the fact that her sense of the ridiculous, which in previous novels she allowed to prick the bubble of sentimentalism and soften the bitterness, is this...