Book Reviews
There is a way of getting inside your characters that renders them intimately known and comprehensively exposed—at once privileged and gutted—and Francine Prose is very good at it. Her people convict themselves out of their own mouths.... Once you start reading [Blue Angel], you'll be hooked. It's not that Prose has simply reversed the politically correct line for mischief's sake. Rather, she has upped the stakes by making Angela as unknowable as Nabokov's Lolita.
Lorna Sage - New York Times Book Review
A literary arsonist with blistering wit, sends up both smug academics and politically correct undergrads in the satrical bonfire Blue Angel.
Entertainment Weekly
Her trenchant satire of sexual harassment gives political correctness a much deserved poke in the eye.
Vanity Fair
Screamingly funny.
USA Today
A mesmerizing and hilarious tour de force.
Us Weekly
Prose is a pro, and this funny yet devastating novel will rock literary and academic worlds alike.
Mademoiselle
Trust the iconoclastic Prose to turn conventional received wisdom on such subjects as predatory professors, innocent female students...on their silly heads. In this astutely observed, often laugh-aloud funny and sometimes touching academic comedy, she proves more skeptic than cynic, with an affection for her central character that is surprisingly warm.... [T]inglingly contemporary and timelessly funny.
Publishers Weekly
Prose's latest novel charts the downward spiral of a creative writing professor caught up in a sexual harrassment scandal.... Like the professor's debasement in the Marlene Dietrich film of the same name, Swenson's impending entanglement is compelling and fascinating to behold. Recommended for all fiction collections. —Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisburg, VA
Library Journal