RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe writer has both control of the material and a loving eye, and the warmth of Thorpe’s tone, together with the thoroughness of her imagination and the artfulness of her pacing, means that skepticism is kept at bay. She sells us on both the characters and the plot, and her refusal to moralize, her ability to get behind her characters despite their mess and fecklessness ... Keeping the ship steady is one of the hardest things to do in an accessible work of comic fiction; often, a less skilled writer will decide too late that they want depth and meaning, and resort to chucking something difficult into the mix ... Thorpe ends this enormously entertaining and lovable book by offering her characters a way out. We want it for them, and they deserve it.
Priscilla Gilman
RaveThe Believer\"One of the reasons I loved Gilman’s book is that through her father she makes a case for criticism as a worthwhile practice. If you’ve been on the receiving end of a kicking, as everyone in the arts has if they live long enough professionally, it’s easy to forget that critics love the arts as much as their practitioners do. And it’s easy to forget, too, that the best criticism can be as illuminating as any other form of writing ... The Critic’s Daughter is a book about a lot of things, but one of them is this: that a fierce and powerful voice, a voice that some people were afraid to hear, can disguise an awful lot of trouble and pain. The critic’s daughter—the writer, as opposed to the book—has the tenderness, the acuity, and the facility to explore her father and her relationship to him in ways that cannot help but resonate. Maybe this is because all of us are the children of critics, in one way or another.\
Arsene Wenger
MixedThe Guardian (UK)There are a million questions that Arsenal fans would want Wenger to answer. The answers, unfortunately, are either missing altogether from My Life in Red and White, or expressed in a way that is long familiar to us ... The opening chapters of what is a surprisingly short book, about Wenger’s childhood and playing days, are elegiac and rather moving ... His career has been spectacular, rich, colourful. But when he is talking about the end at Arsenal there is a glimpse of regret and bitterness. He tells us that after the Invincibles season he turned down job offers from PSG, Juventus, Real Madrid, Bayern Munich, England and France ... He clearly doesn’t think that loyalty was returned ... But that, really, is all this clever, charismatic man will say about his forced departure. Perhaps there will be another, more revealing book, when he has stopped work altogether.
