“Shriver is a lively storyteller, and she keeps readers guessing to the end. . . . Checker and the Derailleurs, like its beguiling protagonist, is hard to forget.” — People
“Ms. Shriver portrays [her characters] with psychological depth and wry humor, dramatizing a subject that’s rarely been exploited in fiction, and pulling off a novel that not only works, but rocks.” — New York Times Book Review
“Nothing if not lyrical, both in the internal assonances of its sentences...and in sentiment. It is fairy tale as well as theology, a domestic adventure story featuring wisdom.” — The New Yorker
“A funkily romantic novel...Shriver’s writing soars.” — Glamour
“A bittersweet, graceful, poetic yet clearsighted vision of the New York Tom Wolfe won’t tell you about. More than that, it is a tale about good and evil, and about the promise and pain of being nineteen.” — Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Surprising, moving, and modern, wonderfully observed and wittily styled. It’s a cover version of some time-honored motifs by a writer with an acute, hip, and loving sensibility: as though Jane Austen listened to rock and roll.” — Amtrak Express
“Brilliant and funny; Checker lives on in memory as a complex fictional creation.” — Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Some of the observations in this book are wrapped so tightly around my own experience of feelings, it seems I have been visited by the friend I always needed or the artist I always wanted to be. It honors the individual and reminds us all of the painful fullness of every soul.” — Grace Slick, former lead singer of Jefferson Airplane
“Shriver is a gifted, expansive writer, and her novel should be a big hit with rock music fans, who have been so poorly served by fiction writers in the past.” — Booklist
“Funny, clever, and touching. Shriver uses a few interesting narrative techniques, and peppers dialogue and exposition with quotations from rock. Her own lyrics are terrific. Recommended.” — Library Journal