There is an Irish lilt to the dialogue and an Irish color to the scenery of Frank O'Connor's stories, even at their most melancholy, which, because it gives them a dimension of the strange, also acts to give them literary dimension. But emptied of local color, the stories in "Crab Apple Jelly" don't at all carry, for me, the weight that others have felt in them. I find them sweetly sad, sadly suggestive, or even a touch frightening at moments, but never more than in the way of the skilfully rendered pastiche. (p. 697)

Diana Trilling, "Fiction in Review: 'Crab Apple Jelly'," in The Nation (copyright 1944 by the Nation Associates, Inc.), Vol. 159, No. 23, December 2, 1944, pp. 696-97.