RaveFinancial Times (UK)Its story is simple, but its resonances complex ... Partita is a musical novel: in its content, its language, its structure and its texture ... Kingsolver is known as an activist writer, but one of the reasons Partita is so interesting is that it doesn’t settle easily into a simple political position ... If at times Partita seems a little neatly sentimental, it arguably earns its cosier moments, after its many striking passages of unsoftened pain and harm; and as a whole, it is a virtuosic performance.
RaveThe Spectator (UK)It is a deliberately simple story, of considerable and radiating power. In tight, short chapters, a portrait builds up of a family dominated by an abusive father ... The triumph of this short, sometimes heartbreaking book is its patient attention to human psychology; and its narrator’s attempt at fair accounting is a constant riposte to the totalitarian monomania of his father.
