PositiveThe Christian Science Monitor[Vampires in the Lemon Grove] is an excellent book. It has its moments of overreach, its grating excesses, but it is the book we were promised in St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves and Swamplandia! It earns its darkness, amounting to an update on E.T.A. Hoffman's tales, and a number of its stories elicit emotion and reflection in a way Russell's previous efforts signally didn't. Real boys and girls, men and women, have taken the place of storybook characters … Vampires in the Lemon Grove is a startling success.
John Banville
PanThe Barnes and Noble Review“There is wordplay, the kind a more generous critic might call Nabokovian, about which the less said the better. Banville — and by extension his narrator — is a sophisticated writer, but it can make him an irritating one.”
