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“Aryn Kyle’s stunning debut is a wry and moving look at a disappearing way of life. [A] powerfully understated, ruefully funny novel.”
— Vogue
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“An awesome debut. To write about such wild country, such beautiful land, and to know the people living in it, is a writer’s dream. Kyle makes it seem easy.”
— Globe and Mail
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“Involving and accomplished. Aryn Kyle’s debut delivers all the fun of the books about horses that you loved as a kid—but with the added weight and seriousness of a novel for grown-ups.”
— Francine Prose
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“A beautiful first novel. [Alice is] close to the little girls in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Member of the Wedding.”
— Washington Post
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“The God of Animals is a moving tale of loss and love. [It’s] an admirable debut by a writer who holds the promise of one day becoming one of the more significant names in the American literary landscape.”
— Denver Post
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Aryn Kyle's stunning debut is a wry and moving look at a disappearing way of life...an astonishingly assured debut... powerfully understated, ruefully funny... it's early Annie Proulx to whom she bears particular comparison
— Megan O'Grady, Vogue
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[A] first novel that's so strong, startling, and moving, that it's a thoroughbred from the first page... In stark, gorgeous prose, Kyle tunnels into the dark heart of the connections between people and place.... The God of Animals does what the best fiction does -- it creates a whole living, breathing world and unfolds it in front of us, granting us entry into a place that, like this author, is impossible to forget.
— Caroline Leavitt, The Boston Globe
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[A] beautiful first novel.
— Carolyn See, The Washington Post
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[An] involving and accomplished first novel... Kyle has a gift for creating character, for making even the most minor players in Alice's drama come alive on the page. And she ties up the strands of her plot in nervy and satisfying ways, so that nothing is predictable as The God of Animals twists and turns toward its conclusion. Aryn Kyle's debut delivers all the fun of the books about horses that you loved as a kid but with the added weight and seriousness of a novel for grown-ups.
— Francine Prose, People
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A memorable novel gracefully compares and contrasts the vast landscapes of the human condition -- people butting up against each other, their natural surroundings and, most significantly, themselves. To find these elements expertly handled in a debut novel -- as they are in The God of Animals-is reason for readers to rejoice.
— Carol Memmott, USA Today
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With her debut novel, Aryn Kyle seems poised to become one of America's next great authors.
— Parade
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Aryn Kyle is one of those handfuls of first-time novelists whose arrival trumpets what might be a major talent. Kyle's The God of Animals is a coming-of-age tale that manages to be both elegiac and hard-nosed. It's an impressive debut.
— Dorman Shindler, The Star Ledger
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In Aryn Kyle's affecting first novel, The God of Animals, the ordeals of horses believably reflect and frame the foolishness and suffering of their so-called masters....Kyle's writing is strong, and Alice's story sucks us into its stringent world, making us curious and worried...It's a tribute to Kyle's honest, unshowy writing that readers will want, with accelerating urgency, to find out what happens.
— The San Francisco Chronicle
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An impressive debut.
— The Seattle Post-Intelligencer