From Publishers Weekly
A cross-country trek to a funeral frames this humorous but unrelentingly arch and predictable account of four one-time Catholic seminary "girls." Georgie, our guide through the book, is a second-string journalist desperate to regain a packet of love letters sent to the deceased in headier days and trying to redeem her career by landing a job at the tres chic, fantastically flaky new magazine, In. Straightlaced Mickey has made few adjustments to the modern world and can't fathom Kathleen, who has left the Church and describes herself as "living in sin, way in," with a juvenile lover named Lance. Their journey en route to comfort bereaved adultress Agnes Mary, is supposed to be one of self-discovery, but Reed (Armed Camps offers few striking revelations, while a morass of guiltthat ubiquitous Catholic guiltovershadows those truths that might have hit home.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Style and subject don't mesh in this novel, which is a hard, brilliant satire, tough to warm up to. Twenty years later the funeral of their friend Agnes's lover reunites four roommates from Catholic Mount Maria College at the Fulcrum Institute, a luxury hotel/compound for celebrities in Florida. Graduates of Mount Maria in the early 1960s, the four womenAgnes, a social worker and unhappy wife; Georgia, a moderately successful newspaper columnist; Kath, a strung-out poet; and Mickey, a housewife who still wears short white gloves to partiesare ill-prepared to cope with middle-aged marital breakdown and moral ambiguity. While Reed's sketches of dissipated scholars and showbiz people at the Institute are on target, her story calls for a stronger narrative thread, less bite and more heart. Joyce Smothers, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Manalapan, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
