The Blue Star

Critical Praise

"I galloped through the novel and relished every page….Earley's simple prose is always informed by Jim's good heart….'The Blue Star,' like its hero, is irresistible."
—Scott Turow for The New York Times Book Review

"In the beguilingly crisp and unfettered language of Tony Earley….Jim lives in a beautifully evoked state of suspended animation."
—Janet Maslin for The New York Times

"When you've loved a novel as much as I loved Tony Earley's 2000 debut, Jim the Boy, the prospect of a sequel triggers an uneasy blend of anticipation and doubt….I'm happy to report that Earley's The Blue Star works as a sequel and a lovely coming-of-age story that can be savored on its own."
—USA Today

"Tony Earley catches up with 'Jim the Boy' in a beguiling sequel that's never too good to be true....Always careful but never fussy, Earley writes prose so cadenced and so acute that he bewitches his readers with an idyll of boyhood so completely realized that we never want to leave it."
—Newsweek

"At the heart of 'The Blue Star' is a good, old-fashion love story….Earley writes with the same lyrical simplicity that he employed in 'Jim the Boy,' calling to mind his literary idol Willa Cather."
—Boston Globe

"Plot wise, this is the narrative equivalent of ambling along a country road. Earley keeps things simple….You take in what you see and savor it without giving it much thought….there's an appealing sweetness to this story."
—Los Angeles Times

"The style and subject matter of Earley's coming-of-age tale harkens back to the classic coming-of-age fiction of writers like J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee."
—Time Out New York

In a cover arts story in The Nashville Tennessean:
Michael Keryling, an authority on Southern literature who teaches at Vanderbilt claims: "Tony's stuff isn't as simple as we might think." The article goes on to say that "Kreyling places Earley's work alongside male, coming-of-age novels like Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Hemingway's Nick Adams stories."

"With the publication of 'Jim the Boy,' Granta named Earley one of 'the Best of The Young American Novelists' and The New Yorker announced him one of the '20 best young fiction writers in America.' Often such praise proves more hopeful than accurate. 'The Blue Star' confirms that the praise is spot on."
—Raleigh News & Observer

"Tony Earley's novels are the Shaker chairs of American literature. They're well-made, sturdy tales that are stripped of excess and postmodern gimmicks, and they just might last you forever….Earley delivers a rarity: a good story, told without fuss or flourish, and with the assurance of someone who knows what he's doing on every page."
—Christian Science Monitor

"Tony Earley and his novels of farm life in the '30s and '40s, 'Jim the Boy,' and a fresh delight, 'The Blue Star,' herald a new nostalgia….In Earley's expert hands that feeling becomes essential, elemental and vanished."
—Newsday

John Freeman praises Tony Earley's The Blue Star in a syndicated review that ran in the Minneapolis Star Tribune Seattle Times, Kansas City Star, Newark Star-Ledger, and Hartford Courant calling it a "very fine book, full of moments of humor and tenderness, prose so glassine you almost forget it is there….in the main, the quietude and restraint of Earley's third-person narration which isn't much different from Flannery O'Connor's or Mark Twain's explains itself….for that reason 'The Blue Star' is, in more ways than one, a wonderful reminder of how we used to live."