She's overly critical of him, at least from this reader's point of view. But Casey defends her. She intervenes sometimes, interpreting for the reader, and part of the time she narrates events she could not possibly have been a part of, which Casey used deliberately as an effect. Edith's disillusionment with Mike is as extreme as her innocent childhood love for him was. In this well-read family, she is known as his Cordelia.
Some passages are absolutely hilarious in a slapstick sense.
In one, Mike loses his cool under attack at a political forum while his ditsy country singer girlfriend tries to lull the crowd with a sing-along, his feisty prospective lover gets in a fight with a heckler and his opponent's daughter accuses him of making a pass at her, then collapses in a classic Southern belle swoon. There is also more gentle and wry humor throughout the book. Personal parallels Humor has probably been a helpful aid in his own family life, which has some obvious parallels to that of the Reardon family. Like Mike, his father was a long-time politician. His two older daughters, Nell and Maud, are roughly the same ages as Edith and Nora.