KIRKUS REVIEW
The Story of Dr. Isabel Dorrows is certainly one that deserves to be told. She was the first woman to become an eye specialist in the U.S. and the first to have worked as a private secretary to the Secretary of State. She came from Scotch immigrant stock who had left Scotland for the promised intellectual freedom of New England and her father was as Suffragette in his thinking as her mother. Marriage to an idealistic minister who took her to India when he became a missionary was a ?hard experience in an age that relegated women to a low status role. His early death was followed by an equally satisfying marriage to Sam Barrows, who urged her to get her degree in ophthalmology from the University of Vienna. Some story? that's not the half of it -- she went on to become a crusading editor/writer. She was great , yet the manner of this telling is diminishing. Banal dialogue, stereotyped reactions and less than satisfactory recreation of her times makes routine uvenile biography of what could have been an outstanding one.