"Powerful, incendiary...Vargas Llosa is a master storyteller." –The Washington Post Book World
"Vargas Llosa is a writer of promethean authority, making outstanding fiction in whatever direction he turns.... Erotically stimulating, artfully self-assured, In Praise of the Stepmother is a steamy as it is intelligent." –
Newsday "Startling...Not only would an American presidential candidate not have written it but the National Endowment for the Arts wouldn't have given it a grant." –
The New Yorker "The author is silky....Vargas Llosa has written a genuinely erotic story and a wicked parody of one." –
Los Angeles Times "An elaborate and lushly written novel." –
USA Today "Vargas Llosa has tickled all our notions of love and lust, felicity and perversity, teased all our ideas of innocence and self-consciousness, and nibbled playful and ambiguous at every romantic fancy, from the classical to the abstract, the ancient to the postmodern, the sacred to the profane." –
San Francisco Chronicle & Examiner