Reviews
"With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations, Everyone's Pretty is both prism and truth."
-- Sarah Weinman, Washington Post Book World
"A kaleidoscopic new satire of America's quietly freakish office workers...gives voice to a wide variety of life's unbeautiful losers--and makes them sing for us."
-- Boston Globe
"Beating through the pages of this strange little book is a lonely heart searching for intimacy in a crazy world."
-- Entertainment Weekly
"Everyone's Pretty is not merely a catalogue of gratuitous weirdness. At the still point of its lurid absurdity is a story about America. Like a sobering radio broadcast playing unattended in the midst of a party run amok...Everyone's Pretty... was drafted before her three previously published novels, Omnivores, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love and My Happy Life (winner of the PEN-USA Award for fiction) had been very well reviewed. Based on this one, I'll put her others on my go-to list."
-- Globe & Mail
"A biting send-up of vapid Americana wrapped up in a hilarious novel about five desperate Los Angelenos in search of redemption."
-- Boldtype
"Juggling an enormous cast of psychos, Everyone's Pretty revels in its own religious chaos, the sexually crazed repeatedly clashing with the sexually pure...The book impressively teeters on the edge of total inanity, each scene becoming increasingly uncomfortable, then unraveling out of control."
-- Village Voice
"Lydia Millet's meandering tale of an alcoholic pornographer with a messianic complex is funny, dark and surprisingly tender in unexpected places... These characters attempt the challenging feat of meandering through five days of cultural and spiritual squalor in ways that are alternatively absurd, mundane and hilarious. Millet has many talents as a writer, but one of her greatest is creating scraps of dialogue that sound like the accidentally significant and funny stuff that is the reason people watch reality TV. Take Bucella's reaction to finding Dean entangled with Phil's wife. 'You have sunk as low as you can, Dean... she is mentally challenged. And married!' Pure poetry. In the right frame of mind."
-- Montreal Mirror
"Everyone's Pretty brings readers into the heart of a Lite-Brite world where drinks flow freely and Three's Company-type situations abound. Millet has an ear for rhythm and repetition -- no small task while balancing her hyperreal high jinks. About a rooster: "His beak was nobly arched, his claws sharp, his feathers preened: but the old hen was squawking again, flustered by his virile displays. She pecked like a hen and spat like a camel." In Everyone's Pretty, you are in the hands of a writer whose diction complements the high-wire world of her players."
-- Boston Phoenix
"Absolutely captivating...I picked it up, read it almost in one day--and I was pissed when I had to stop. Everyone's Pretty is fast & furious reading that nearly hypnotizes."
-- Sex Kitten
"Millet refreshingly reveals some tenderness in the everyday heartache."
-- Venus
"Millet...treats her characters without condescension and with surprising tenderness and respect as they wind their way toward a sort of tattered redemption."
-- Elegant Variation
"Everyone's Pretty is so transgressive, so wildly and beautifully dark, that it's like a breath of fresh air in a stale literary environment overrun with too-clever postmodernists."
-- Tucson Weekly
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