FRANCES AND BERNARD was featured by Rene Steinke in the BookForum article “Flannery O'Connor, Faith, and Fiction." She says “this epistolary novel gathers power and momentum as the correspondence between the characters..becomes more fraught…Bauer does an amazing job of dramatizing the journey of this friendship, each voice a convincingly particular evocation of a literary and religious imagination.” Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published the book February 5, 2013.