A Review by Carolyn Dart
Florida Times Union
21 April 1963
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                Strongly individualistic and intense is this original novel by a young Englishwoman, Jennifer Lash.  She writes with great insight, feeling and sympathy of a young monk, the men and women whose lives touch his and whose lives are influenced by him.

                Among the personalities portrayed are an aging abbot, conscientious but weary of decision-making; Jonathan Sargent, a sensitive and confused youth seeking the route to his destiny; Isabella Barton, a young wife and mother who is in a critical emotional state imagines herself in love with the brilliant but cold monk Lucius Trehearne.

                 Miss Lash describes with compassion these persons' attempts to find their way out of the emotional mazes in which they find themselves.  For some, the difficulties are self-created; for others, forced upon them.  Each looks for guidance to the monk Lucius.  But though the troubled sometimes fail to recognize it, Lucius has no wisdom to give them because he is lacking in true concern for them.

            The novel is a serious, searching attempt to portray strong characters' relationships among themselves and with their God.  At times it succeeds admirably.  But the essential conflict is never satisfactorily defined and its resolution is viewed therefore through an obscuring haze.

             Miss Lash has attempted a cosmic theme:  the reality of divine love and the range of human attempts at response to it.  That she has not succeeded perfectly does not alter the fact that she has written a book of intense feeling, often expressed with great beauty.  The prism of her message is thought-provoking, but it is unclear.