SOURCE: "Mistress of Tart Remarks," in Books in Canada, Vol. XXII, No. 2, March, 1993, pp. 46.

Harvor is a Canadian educator, poet, and fiction writer. In the following review, she voices a mixed opinion of Graven Images, finding the novel's collage style superficial but praising Thomas's evocative descriptive language.

In Terrorists and Novelists, the critic Diane Johnson, writing about Charlotte Brontë, describes her as a writer who had the "artistic daring to risk heroines so deviant as to be plain." These words came back to me as I was reading Graven Images, Audrey Thomas's new novel; they recalled an early Thomas story, "A Winter's Tale," whose subject is a "plain" girl who's an exchange student in the 1950s in Scotland. That early story, once you get past its didactic opening paragraph, seems to me to be one of the most undervalued stories in the whole Canadian canon. The dialogue between...