Critical Praise

"Brilliant...Walbert's characters are caught like insects in amber as they make late-in-life discoveries no school could ever teach. Brittle, funny and poignant, this is a prickly treat."

——Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"[A] crystalline second novel, "Our Kind combines a wistful lyricism with wry humor in its portrayal....Like her characters, her prose style is consistently elegant and possessed of a surprising strength-due in large part to the novel's authoritative, first-person-plural narrative voice....[A] startling, aching beauty...Kate Walbert's keen-eyed social observations (not unlike Jane Austen's)...really sparkle. I look forward to more of them in her next book."

——Amanda Kolson Hurley, The Washington Times

"Kate Walbert's dazzling novel has the elegiac grace and wisdom-and also the wistfulness-of a John Cheever story. The collective narrative voice gives the novel a breathtaking authority. The tragedy of these empty, prosperous lives could make this a cruel farce were it not so delicately and deliciously rendered into something far finer. What a marvelous book."

——Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson and The Little Women

"[T]he 1950s women of Walbert's "novel in stories," Our Kind, are a dying breed; but she insists, rightly, on the viability of their ambition-nipped lives."

——Village Voice