Rachel Wyatt's episodic novel Mona Lisa Smiled a Little is a domestic book, if you will, concerned mostly with the lives of people perhaps not quite like you and me. And they are presented with a special panache in a voice that is solidly Ms. Wyatt's own. Wyatt is a woman not afraid to put her birth date on the copyright page. She's 70 but her years have been generous to her, and to us.

[Robert Harlow / BCBW 2000]