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Outstanding
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Chicago Sun-Times Randy Michael Signor
Doyle writes with a voice that rings like a note crying out of a burnished cornet. You'd swear Louis Armstrong himself was telling you the story.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Allen Barra
Viking is reprinting "A Star Called Henry" to coincide with the release of Oh, Play That Thing. Together, they constitute one of the most remarkable achievements in recent Irish and American literature -- and we're left with the tantalizing possibility of a third novel to follow.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Julie Hatfield
Henry Smart may not be admirable, but he is unforgettable.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Jason Berry
A bold venture into the dream life of jazz in America. It is also a remarkable performance in language.
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Favorable
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Booklist Allison Block
Doyle displays his trademark sensitivity and wit in a tale full of adventure, passion, and prose as punchy as a Satchmo riff. [1 Sept 2004, p.4]
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Favorable
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Village Voice Allen Barra
Like a musician mixing blues riffs with snatches of jigs, Doyle weaves his story through numerous genres.
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Mixed
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The Spectator Sandra Howard
This volume is staccato; the backdrop is great, the story imaginative, a potentially powerful vehicle, but -- and I may just be missing a satirical vein and its real point -- the heart of the story, the believable core, was hard to find.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Elizabeth Grove-White
Doyle has always written brilliantly about popular music, and the Chicago section of Oh, Play That Thing (the title is from a King Oliver classic) throbs with the syncopation and verve of Chicago's 1920s jazz scene.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Terry Eagleton
What it lacks in human thickness it makes up for in pace and drama...But in the end, the novel is too starry-eyed rather than too streetwise.
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Mixed
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The Independent Cole Moreton
Just like jazz, the dialogue follows its own rhythms - and sometimes becomes hard to follow, even incomprehensible, until the reader is left disoriented and gasping for the sweet air of clarity like an exhausted flapper dizzied by the drums and the dope.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Robert Hanks
The book descends, too much of the time, into overcrowded picaresque, one damn thing after another.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Fatally overstuffed and chaotic...An uncharacteristic misstep in a brilliant writer's estimable career.
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
There's just too much material; any of the novel's numerous strands could have been fleshed out into its own book.
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Unfavorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Gerard Windsor
There are multiple problems with this breathless economy of words. For one thing, it's a trait engrained in everyone in the novel. There are more characters here than in a madhouse, and when they all talk in these often elliptical one-liners, the whole scene becomes very blurry indeed.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times Richard Eder
Doyle is a visitor, if a keen one. There's nothing wrong with this except that the mythical surges, the comedy swelling into epic, don't suit the visitor role. His Henry is not simply a picaresque figure, a hyperactive Zelig present at all the big moments. He helps them happen; he is a Paul Bunyan imported from the Irish wars but -- with all respect to jazz, mobs and the Depression -- one who has no real forests to cut.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph David Robson
A clumsy piece of work, rolling genially along but lacking the virtuosity and, above all, the craftsmanship of the best picaresque fiction.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Troy Patterson
In the absence of a genuine story, phony history must suffice.
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Unfavorable
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The Guardian Lisa O'Kelly
It is less successful, less convincing. Perhaps, in part, this is because Doyle's idiosyncratic Irish voice sounds less sure of itself among the diaspora in America, and a lot less authentic in the mouths of Americans themselves.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Book Review Anthony Quinn
Try as Doyle might to romanticize Henry as another wild rover, by the end the book is in serious trouble. The urgency of the New York-Chicago period has slowed to a stagger, and Armstrong's vibrant horn blowing has been replaced by Henry plucking mournfully at our heartstrings.
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Terrible
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Washington Post Rodney Welch
How could the author of so spirited a novel as "A Star Called Henry" write a sequel as lame as Oh, Play That Thing?
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Terrible
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The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
A crushing disappointment.
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