In The Professor's Daughter, Raboteau writes with raw eloquence and intellectual ferocity. Narrator Emma Boudreaux's tone is admirably fresh and matter-of-fact. Faced with strangers' fascination over her biracial appearance, she draws closer and closer to her brother Bernie. For the most part, Raboteau manages a child's perspective with exactitude and curiosity: Emma gazes at the "metal rainbow" of St. Louis on a road trip, and describes the stillness of a restaurant that refuses to serve her family "like a library, only evil." There are times when Emma's young voice is overwritten - "my father is mad and my mother is sad and brother is bad", or "Nan Zan is old old," but these moments, where the prose stumbles, are rare. The novel is occupied with a multitude of voices, and each is distinct and lovely. Many of the stories follow Emma's adult life, and her unpredictable crises, lovers, and travels.

When Bernie falls into a coma after an accident, the tension of his sustained silence hovers in the narrative. Occasionally, Raboteau glimpses into Bernie's mind; far more interesting are Emma's ruminations as she studies her brother while he drools on a cot in Princeton at their parents' home. Her voice is a tribute to Bernie, a memorial to his brilliance and creativity. She rarely addresses his eventual death, and continues to write to him. She is filled with sorrow and longing: for her depressed mother, who prays alone in her driveway after her son dies and her husband leaves her, and for her own inability to grasp a feeling of contentment. Throughout her studies at Yale and her adult life in New York, Emma is overwhelmed by Bernie's absence and her own social position as a woman of two races.

The novel does not belong to Emma alone. Raboteau reveals Bernard Jr.'s childhood in the Deep South. His father, a baseball prodigy, is lynched by envious men. His mother is trapped in a chilling asylum, and he is cared for by Nan Zan, a raiser of orphans and a legend to Bernie and Emma. Eventually, he wins a scholarship to a prep school, where, for safety, he is removed from the dormitory and placed in a closet. Again, Raboteau's writing is filled with sadness, but also with a quiet triumph.

The novel's richness is not confined to the Bourdeaux family alone. In "White Buffalo Woman", Meteke, the Ethiopian wife of Bernard Jr.'s colleague, tries to stop a hunt in Princeton to regulate the deer population. In "The Origins of Little Willa," a story Emma writes at Yale, the narrative takes on the quality of fable; the details are stunning, and the sorrow of the tale resonates. Raboteau has a knack for lovely imagery: "the sunrise was a pink welt", and a "face [is] like untroubled water." Like Emma, the reader will be haunted by the ceaseless cruelty of Emma's world, but also by its occasional loveliness.