The New York Times Book Review
- Matthew Specktor
Sequels, of course, are tricky things. All too often they feel like products of convenience, if not of commercial necessity…Yet these fears were rapidly dispelled by Doyle's unsentimental way with both scene and sentence. He's not milking anything here, and whatever possible bathos inheres in a book that's going to twine mortal confrontation with light-stepping domestic comedy, Doyle coolly avoids it…I was undone by the emotional clarity of the writing itself, and by the calm, yet never static, way Doyle has of presenting a scene…What saves The Guts from sentimentality, too, is Doyle's deft tendency to play on the backbeat, so to speak, to give us not the moment of confrontation, but the moment of consequence…The effect is gorgeously understated, and lets the book's high comedy, as well as its melancholy, have its full due.
