PositiveThe New York Times Book Review...a slender but affecting debut novel ... the kind of sensitive, carefully wrought autobiographical first novel that may soon be extinct from the mainstream publishing world ... Telling incidents are described in simple language that occasionally rises to a keening lyricism ... The scenes have the jumbled feel of homemade movies spliced together a little haphazardly, echoing the way memory works ... From the patchwork emerges a narrative of emotional maturing and sexual awakening that is in many ways familiar (no prizes for guessing the nature of the sexual awakening in question) but is freshened by the ethnicity of the characters and their background, and the blunt economy of Mr. Torres’s writing, lit up by sudden flashes of pained insight ... He does not always avoid the kind of overly cultivated eloquence that announces a writer staking his claim for literary achievement.
Kate Summerscale
RaveThe New York TimesMs. Summerscale has found a nifty literary specialty: resurrecting and reanimating, in detail as much forensic as it is novelistic, notorious true-life tales of the Victorian era ... Enjoyable as an atmospheric tale of crime and punishment from a distant era written in lucid, limber prose, The Wicked Boy also implicitly raises questions that remain with us today ... Ms. Summerscale’s easy mastery of what turns out to be a complicated, at times surprising narrative drives the book forward.
