[This Is Not for You, a] sensitive yet almost documentary account of the college and early adult life of a woman, is unsettling because of its precarious balance between conscious emotional restraint and the force of a supreme desire to love. Kate, the protagonist, succumbs, through brief affairs, to her lesbianism, yet denies herself a relationship with her best friend Esther. By her sacrifice, whatever future fulfillment there might have been is lost…. The novel has substance and insight, and an intellectualism that at times may strike you as stilted or a bit contrived. Still, this slightly extraordinary account proves that love knows no limitations of person, place, or time—but that life is a corridor of doors and only one at a time may be opened and entered.

Jody Haberland, in a review of "This Is Not for You," in Library Journal (reprinted from Library Journal, July...