‘To read Rule of the Bone is to want everyone you know to read every last word, to hear the story in Bone’s words and see the world through his eyes. . . . One of the great rewards of the classic coming-of-age novel (and Rule of the Bone is surely one) is that the reader is allowed not only to observe but to partake in the protagonist’s growing acumen, to watch the wide-eyed wise up and maybe to smarten up a little ourselves.”
—Washington Post
“Ingenious. . . . It takes a very special and hard-to-achieve voice to make a first-person fictional character. And it takes something close to a miracle to achieve a first-person voice for a 14-year-old that will do vital and nuanced justice not only to the boy but to the age-old world he moves through. Bone’s voice performs excellenty.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Brutally, often fantastically picaresque . . . captures the mix of defiance and confusion, pride and remorse. . . . The moral underlying Banks’ work up to now asserts itself with a new force. . . . He is at his characteristic best as he explores the combustible mix of fear, frustration and passionate feelings.”
—The New Republic
“Veteran novelist Banks has finally done it: He has written the Great American Novel. Or, to be more precise, he has rewritten it. Rule of the Bone is Huckleberry Finn transposed to Upstate New York in the 1990s. Banks . . . excels at portraying lives on the edge. .. . In Rule of the Bone he gives us a searing wake-up call.”
—People
“What Russell Banks has given us in his fiction is the truth— sometimes creepily intimate—about what’s going on in the underpasses of America’s highways. . . . Bone’s scary pilgrimage is a continuation of that journey, and an emotionally authentic one.”
—Boston Globe
“Banks has . . . pulled one adolescent from the drably dressed, drifting throng and found in his candor and freshness some-diing like a diamond.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Rule of the Bone works because we are strongly moved by someone who can keep his integrity in a world that barely knows the word.”
—Seattle Times