Critical Praise

"A series of adventures and misadventures at turns hilarious, deeply moving, and downright terrifying...A picaresque romp that takes a good, long look into the human heart, this is a stunning debut."

——Publishers Weekly

"Queer, bright, and poetic, this revisionist view of America's West Coast in the nineteenth century is a sad comedy of misunderstanding and misperception: of one race by another; of the sane by the mad, and vice versa; and most pervasively, of women by men....Unexpectedly moving."

——The New Yorker

"Incandescent...Playful and phantasmogoric...Strange, moving and bewitching...Its characters are bizarre and outsize...innocents caught in the machinery of the new empire. Unforgettable."

——Los Angeles Times Book Review

"In this accomplished first novel, Karen Joy Fowler blends fact and fiction to create a richly imagined tableau of the Pacific Northwest in the 1870s....The product of an unusually fertile imagination...Sarah Canary whets the appetite for what this interesting new writer...will serve up next."

——The New York Times Book Review

"A quirky, intriguing yarn about how supposedly civilized society treated its misfits and outcasts...The author's message, delivered in a delightful, eccentrically wrapped package, is that at its core, America hasn't changed one whit since those rugged, lawless pioneer days....Fowler expertly blends the peculiar mythology of the Old West into a seamless novel of powerful immediacy and thoroughly modern overtones. A literary tour de force."

——Booklist

"This powerfully imagined and delightfully readable book reminds us that even in the 19th century, that most and least enlightened age, things were never exactly as they seemed....The narrative is interspersed, or perhaps decorated is the word, with short bursts of history: world famous freaks, riots, steamboat disasters--all the journalistic currency of the late 19th-century frontier....Fowler has an uncompromising and informed political vision, but this does not mean that she berates white men or the America they (we) built. She simply allows us to see ourselves through other eyes....Here is a work that manages to be at the same time (and often in the same sentence) dark and deep and fun."

——The Washington Post Book World

"Sarah Canary is the locus of an exceptional story--a larger than life, Magical Realist western that is funny, mysterious and harrowing by turns....Its imaginative virtuosity and stylistic resources announce Karen Joy Fowler as a major writer."

——New York Newsday