The author of numerous books and articles on object relations theory, notably Object Relations and the Developing Ego in Therapy, Psychoanalytic Object Relations Therapy, The Primacy of Structure, and Treating the Oedipal Patient, Althea J. Horner has undertaken in this novel what I regard to be a book-length report of a psychoanalysis. Make no mistake, this is as enjoyable a page-turner as we might find anywhere. It is the story of two women, an analyst and a patient, and—precisely because it was authored by a psychoanalyst admired for her scholarship and clinical wisdom—must also be read, perhaps as all good fiction should be read, as an interpretive vision of a reality, in this instance of a clinical reality, that cannot otherwise find its way into print. This is the matter that most strikes me about Homer's novel.

Increasingly, the publication of actual clinical work with patients has come under