PositiveVogueThe families McCulloch writes about...strive hard, mainly through the Herculean efforts of the mothers, to create cohesion, identity, all appearance of harmony. Inevitably, it seems, these efforts are, if not doomed, at least fractured. Meanwhile, McCulloch’s observations are priceless. It’s a little disappointing that she follows daughterly convention by saving her most savage lines for her mother while letting her father—a wealthy alcoholic who spends his time mastering ever-more obscure languages and writing stories for his children about an octopus who goes on eight-fisted bar crawls—off easy. But she is by turns piercingly vivid and and devastatingly amusing nonetheless ... There is much to enjoy here and much to think about ... In the midst of all these fragments straining for togetherness, there is, in fact, nuance and grace.
Randy Kennedy
PositiveVogueWhat starts off feeling a little like a B-movie offering the inverse of Western romance in the company of losers and lowlifes quickly transforms into a road trip...thriller defined by startling shifts and turns. Tumbling accidentally into the mix comes a young Mennonite girl, 11 years old, ethereally blond, strange, and strong, whose fate is now entangled with the brothers’, her purity a foil to Troy’s amorality. Like a herding rope, the plot unfolds in taut scenes juxtaposed with wonderful loops of description, flashback, and spare dialogue that occasionally swells into flashes of revelation, all of it grounded in a palpable sense of place.
Claire Tomalin
RaveVogueSomething strange happens when a fantastic biographer turns the focus on herself: She gets sort of shy, a little laconic, understated in the English manner. Yet I drank in every word of [A Life of My Own], an account of the 60-plus-year career and times of the author, now in her mid-80s, whose experience absorbingly lays out the terrain for intelligent working women of her time, and contains breathtaking quantities of accomplishment and personal tragedy ... Through it all, Tomalin herself remains rather elusive... What she gives us here is profound and admirable, and I’ll take any wisdom I can get from a brilliant, stout-hearted writer, worker, mother, and wife—who sends me out for Pepys.
Rosamund Young
PositiveVogueThe book was originally published by a small agricultural press before word of mouth—not least from the beloved English playwright Alan Bennett, who wrote the introduction—paved the way to a wider audience. Young describes her own work as simply a string of anecdotes and observations grouped around certain themes but the musings reveal things far more profound … Rosamund Young’s The Secret Life of Cows deserves its sudden reputation as a first-hand account of unutterable charm.
