This week­end the New York Times Book Review finally gets around to review­ing Annie Dillard’s The Maytrees. (You can read it now here.)

Julia Reed, the reviewer, likes the book, but it takes half the review before she’ll admit it. First she has to work her way through famil­iar com­plaints about Dillard’s vocab­u­lary and the by now com­mon­place quo­ta­tion from Eudora Welty’s 1975 Pil­grim at Tinker Creek review. But Reed gets there, grudg­ingly, even­tu­ally call­ing the book “a near great one.”