REVIEWS		  
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What Literay Blogs Are Saying About Throw Like a Girl
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Praise for Throw Like a Girl

“Some of the collection’s biggest satisfactions happen line by line, thanks to Thompson’s effortless ability to tip her prose into the universal....It’s a testament to Thompson’s writing that she’s able to wrest so much variety and entertainment from a …literary landscape.”
-- New York Times Book Review

“[Thompson] is a sensitive, humorous, very informed chronicler—no, singer—of ordinary people in ordinary towns who face ordinary life issues, primarily relationships in familial and sexual forms. But it is Thompson’s ability to spot the special feature of any such situation to the individual involved that is her strength and attraction. It wouldn’t be wrong to also call her the poet of these unglamorous lives, given her pithy, poignant, yet often beautiful prose style.”
-- Booklist
(starred review)

"In her fourth collection of gritty, grueling stories, [Thompson] emerges as something very much like Alice Munro. Each of the 12 stories is precisely fashioned, distinguished by complex and unsparing characterizations and studded with metaphors made from the stuff of everyday life...and wry acknowledgements of the sheer drugery of living. In [her best stories], Thompson rivals Munro at her greatest. One of the best contemporary short-story writers in peak form."
-- Kirkus Review
(starred review)

"Twelve stories trace the arc of womanhood from pubescent gloom to end-of-life regrets in this moody but compassionate collection ... Thompson packs a gallon’s worth of wisdom into each quart-size gem.”
-- People Magazine

"In stirring prose and masterfully funny repartee, Thompson writes from somewhere inside her characters, filling them with urges and ambitions that bubble up and set off ripples of longing. These stories are insistent that children aren’t unwise and that we often gain vitality as we age. Most of all, they remind you of people in your own life—and make you feel like you know them just a little better."
-- Elle Magazine

“The 12 stories in Throw Like a Girl ... plumb the recesses of the female heart with the assurance and finesse of a skilled cardiologist. Thompson knows how to hook her readers, then pay out plots and information gradually, and she knows exactly how long a story needs to be.”
-- Heller McAlpin, San Francisco Chronicle

"Thompson excels at portraying characters too easily betrayed by those they hoped to love and be loved by, too unobservant or naive to notice the thunderbolts poised to strike them down. She's unsurpassed at exploring the defensive psyches of people who know they don't fit in. And she can encapsulate a life's worth of disillusionment in a single stinging, hurtling sentence… Her plainspoken stories reveal a keen understanding of the relationships people form with familiar places and common objects as well as with other people. It's as if she's saying we're all simple creatures, despite a tendency to complicate everything we touch. Love and devotion and perseverance don't always work, it's true. But what do we have that's any better? Her heartfelt, heartachy stories dramatize the quandary memorably, while never forgetting to remind us that we have to keep on truckin', and trying.”
—- Bruce Allen, Boston Globe

“[B]ut what links [the stories] most strongly is Thompson's talent for what might be called full-immersion points of view, locating us deep within a character's thoughts and sensory perceptions. Her use of point of view depends on small, dead-on detail, as well as an empathetic understanding of what it is to love someone, for better and for much, much worse.”
-- Lynna Williams, Chicago Tribune

"A hard-hitting latest collection of stories ... Thompson's talent is on full display."
-- Publisher's Weekly

“These are potent, thrilling stories, and this is one of the best collections to come along this year.”
-- Miami Herald

“A revelation ... [Thompson is] a great writer with a gift for showing us the dignity and pathos in every life.”
-- Anne Fernald, The Quarterly Conversation
 
 
  

Praise for Who Do You Love

"With spare eloquence, Thompson surveys the lives of emotionally dislocated people craving connection, but infuses even the saddest situation with humor and a wry glimmer of hope. The fifteen stories in this collection ring with an unpretentious integrity and a knowledge of human complexities."
-- Publishers Weekly
Best Books of 1999

"Like Raymond Carver, Thompson is fascinated by the sudden and unlikely communion of people. Her characters vary -- there are junkies, cops, women who've lost men to drugs, religion and everything else, but she never condescends to them, no matter how hungry their hearts are, no matter how many screws they have loose....Her fiction may never make her rich, but Who Do You Love is still a gold mine."
-- Jeff Giles, Newsweek

"A quietly devastating book...few fiction writers working today have more successfully rendered the sensation of solid ground suddenly melting away, pinpointing that instant when the familiar present is swallowed up by an always encroaching past or voided future."
-- Katherine Dieckmann,
The New York Times Book Review

Praise for City Boy

"A cage-rattling, profoundly satisfying book."
-- Pam Houston, O, The Oprah Magazine

"Mesmerizing...City Boy abounds in...mordant wit and keen psychological observations."
-- Boston Herald

"The dark and punishing terrain of the broken human heart is flawlessly charted by Jean Thompson in City Boy."
-- Baltimore Sun

Praise for Wide Blue Yonder

"Detonates a whole fireworks of happy endings -- flares of hope and success so exuberant that the book almost seems to require a warning label."
-- Lisa Zeidner
The New York Times Book Review

"Wide Blue Yonder offers precisely the kind of beautifully crafted, intelligent, imaginative writing that serious readers crave....Each sentence deserves to be appreciated."
-- Deirdre Donahue, USA Today

"Wide Blue Yonder reaffirms Thompson's stature as one of our most lucid and insightful writers."
-- Andrew Roe,
San Francisco Chronicle