"The book is split between Otterley, a fictional suburb of manicured houses and back gardens, and Ladbroke Grove, the site of hippie excess, progressive dropping out, and émigré professional striving. Hadley focuses on Phyllis Fischer, a forty-year-old housewife, and her fifteen-year-old daughter Colette. The attention to these two characters, as they break slowly and then all at once from the circuits of the lives expected for them, makes up the bulk of the plot. Phyllis is elegant, the well-groomed and beautifully dressed mistress of a tidy and perfectly kept Arts and Crafts house. She cooks Elizabeth David for her husband Roger, a member of the British Foreign Office, and her two children (Colette’s brother Hugh is an impish, energetic nine-year-old). In other words, Phyllis is an accumulation of all the tasteful markers of a comfortable middle-class life, from her L’Air du Temps perfume to her dithering about her garden’s “herbaceous border.” Her character is circumscribed and shaped by her set hair, her pink lipstick, her lightly adventurous evening gown, by the long back gardens and fish ponds behind respectable homes that make up the life of an Otterley wife and mother."