The NY Times review mention above was, in my opinion, not of much value — most of the negative aspect of it reflected the reviewer’s distance from the author’s generation in terms of use of language. Certainly it is a better book than he found it.

Having said that, I should warn that it isn’t really a “therapist” book. Most of that angle, as I read it, shows up in the way that Grace and Mitch so totally separate their professional and personal lives that they end up turning themselves into potential patients instead of practitioners of what they preach.

As an aside: unlike lascosas, I really enjoyed ‘Our Daily Bread’ – I’d agree that the town versus mountain bit is too neat and almost a cliché, but I thought her other explorations of Us and Them worked very well – there is hardly a relationship in the book that isn’t founded on mutual dependency and need. I also thought Davis was quite subtle in some areas – abuse glimpsed through windows rather than heavy-handedly detailed, the religious aspect played down so that it was more of an undercurrent. And the characters were wonderfully written.