What readers think of Outside Valentine, plus links to write your own review.

This is a story that reached out and touched my heart. I cried, laughed, was frightened, and felt love with this book. Ward really knew what she was writing. This book was exhilarating to the mind and to the soul. Reading this book was the best thing I've done and accomplished in my life so far. I would read this book over and over again. Bravo!

I was the fiction editor at AGNI magazine when an excerpt from Liza Ward's OUTSIDE VALENTINE crossed my desk, and it raised the goosebumps on my arm that signify a true and unusual new talent. I told my senior editor that we had to snap up the story--one of the segments of the novel featuring Caril Ann Fugate's voice--right away, and he agreed--but it was too late. Luckily, Ms. Ward gave us another excerpt, which we did publish. I was delighted to see the novel subsequently appear and receive such superlative reviews, which it certainly deserves. Caril Ann in particular, with her extraordinary diction and painful wistfulness, is a marvel of a character. As a novelist myself, I take my hat off to Liza Ward & will be watching eagerly for her next book.

THis book has a tendency toward the not only melodramatic, but simplified understanding of lower class America that stems from obvious wealth. I think the author has obviously driven a hard point home about research: It doesn't always pay to know the facts if the knowledge of human experience is one which cannot hear the pulse of its character. Risk sentimentality, one poet said, or you're not risking anything.