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Outstanding
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Library Journal Robin Nesbitt
This wonderful read is an insightful look at our time and the decisions people make. Highly recommended. [1 June 2006, p.108]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Intelligent, evocative and unsparing. [15 June 2006, p.596]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Her writing is so fluid, and her plot so cleverly constructed, that events seem inevitable, yet the narrative is ultimately surprising and masterful as a contemporary comedy of manners.
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Outstanding
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The Observer Alex Clark
But to imply that The Emperor's Children succeeds only through its satirical energies would be to downplay Messud's talents as a miniaturist; she is as much interested in her characters' inner lives as she is in writing social comedy.
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Outstanding
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Slate Katie Roiphe
Claire Messud's remarkable new novel The Emperor's Children is that mythical hybrid that publishers dream of one day finding in the piles of manuscripts on their desks: a literary page-turner.
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Outstanding
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USA Today Elysa Gardner
Her vivid, juicy writing ensures an exhilarating read throughout, but it also demands that we continually scrutinize and reconsider the details. Everyone and everything is not as it seems on the surface.
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Outstanding
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New York Observer Mindy Aloff
A suspenseful, dark, pitch-perfect comedy of manners and morals. [28 Aug 2006]
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Meghan O'Rourke
The Emperor's Children is full of satirical chiding, but it's one of the more delightful -- even delicious -- forms of such chiding I’ve encountered. Messud's prose is whorled and Jamesian, of a syntactical complexity that only a confident stylist could handle. Her plot is labyrinthine and deftly orchestrated.
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Outstanding
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Village Voice Sara Eckel
Deftly switching between six points of view, Messud crafts a gripping story of clashing ambitions, compromised loyalties, and the love/hate relationship between the powerless and the powerful.
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Outstanding
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Wall Street Journal Merle Rubin
Ms. Messud weaves her storylines together ingeniously, portraying her characters with a shrewd perceptiveness and making their fates seem, for much of the novel, suspensefully uncertain and, by the end, morally illuminating and surprising.
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Outstanding
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The Economist
The surprise here is that such an obvious and overworked cliché can be transformed into so intelligent and unsparing a piece of fiction.
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Outstanding
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The Spectator Jane Gardam
A splendid American novel...An ambitious, confident, most readable book by a first-rate storyteller with the youth and vitality to spread a huge canvas and enjoy filling it. As in Langland’s ‘field full of folk’ there are the evil and the good and Messud knows them all.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Ron Charles
For us, Messud's novel, so arch and elegantly phrased, is a chance to enter a world in which everything glistens with her wit, like waking to an early frost: refreshing, enchanting and deadly.
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Outstanding
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Salon Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
These relationships drive the plot, which is a feat of irresistibly readable storytelling, at times agonizing in its tension.
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Outstanding
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The Nation Kate Levin
Ultimately, most impressive is the way Messud relates 9/11 to her characters' lives: The public tragedy doesn't eclipse but rather seeps into and amplifies their private sorrows.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Yvonne Zipp
Absorbingly intelligent...Her writing is so sure-handed that she doesn't even stumble on the hurdle of the Sept. 11 attacks (although the book ends too abruptly thereafter), and her exploration of entitlement is both witty and astute.
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Outstanding
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The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
Though they each suffer harsh appraisal at times, it's a tribute to Messud's empathetic gifts that they come off as fully formed, deeply flawed human beings rather than mere caricatures.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Ms. Messud delineates this Manhattan world with quick, sure, painterly strokes, relying less on Tom Wolfeian status details and obviously satiric vignettes than on her psychological radar for how people talk and behave.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Joyce Carol Oates
Ambitious, multilayered, set predominantly in Manhattan in the months leading up to, and following, September 11, The Emperor's Children is Messud's first American-set novel, as it is her first work of fiction to rapidly shift perspective from chapter to chapter, leaping about, with authorial freedom, among a number of interlocked characters.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Katie Owen
There is much to enjoy here, not least Messud's delicate yet devastating use of irony, her nuanced portrayal of character and motive and her vivid descriptions of New York interiors. If on philosophical and political levels the novel fails to resonate as one suspects is intended, with 9/11 functioning as little more than a dramatic plot device, The Emperor's Children is still worth reading.
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Favorable
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Atlantic Monthly Elizabeth Judd
The brinkmanship makes for an excellent read, but some of the pretentious declarations grow tiresome. ("You shun my efforts at gallantry? How shaming.")
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Lisa Moore
Sometimes, Messud's language sounds peculiarly antiquated to my ear, the sentences longish and the diction overly formal, even a little staid.
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Favorable
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The Independent Michèle Roberts
Gracefully written.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker
The humorous intimacies of Messud’s portraits do not, finally, soften the judgments behind them: If this is what’s become of the liberal imagination, is it worth fighting for?
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Gilbert Cruz
While The Emperor's Children impressively explores entitlement and waning youth, it dips into somewhat exploitative territory by using the most dramatic tragedy in recent years (see the date) as the impetus for these navel-gazing narcissists to reconsider their shallow lives.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
The provincialism of this narrow world can be a wearying place to linger, however engaging its delivery and however shrewd its narrative intelligence.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Alfred Hickling
The overall problem is not so much that the book lacks ambition as that its focus seems frustratingly narrow.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Kasia Boddy
When imagining how September 11 changed some lives forever, she falls back on thriller-style plot devices and clichés about a "new world" (in short, on journalism). But she also wants to say that, mostly, her characters' fates are determined by other, more ordinary, events.
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Unfavorable
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Sydney Morning Herald James Bradley
More deeply, the novel suffers from a confusion of purpose. Its ambition is to be a grand social comedy but despite Messud's sophisticated control of character and form, the political satire is hard to take seriously.
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