PanThe New York Times Book ReviewThe meanings laid bare in the text contradict RuPaul’s narration again and again. What’s revealed is a striver high on his own supply who tries to spin his story as empathetic wisdom draped in Instagram-ready captions ... Living a life and coherently expressing a life story on the page are two very different arts. Rather than patiently allowing his tale to unfold, he struggles not to remind us that everything that has ever happened to him happened for a reason.
Kiese Laymon
RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"The idea of excellence is a wire, sometimes barbed, often electrified, strung through nearly every page of Kiese Laymon’s memoir, Heavy ... And part of the wonder of Laymon’s book is his commitment to getting as close to the truth as possible, even when it means asking painful questions about what we owe the people who brought us into this world and, somehow, managed to keep us alive in it ... If this book succeeds as a thoughtful and hard-wrought examination of how a black man came into his own in a country determined to prevent that from happening, it’s because of the painstaking manner in which Laymon walks the reader through the various perils and costs of striving ... as Laymon’s excellent memoir suggests, a refusal to ask and answer difficult questions about ourselves and the people we love can be lethal.\
Toni Morrison
PositiveNPRThe music of Morrison's writing has been turned down so low, one is tempted to put their ear against the novel's pages. After Bride grows up into a gorgeous and successful cosmetics executive, living in California, the book reads like a modern-day fable about a woman who thinks she has survived her past simply because of the gift of time's passage and her life's glamorous new trappings. The contemporary setting of God Help The Child seems to cut off opportunities for the author's lauded lyricism ... By itself, God Help The Child is simply a good book. In the company of its sister novels though, it transcends the limits of its own pages and becomes another act in a painfully exquisite drama that spans centuries.
