SOURCE: Cooke, Judy. “Pain Control.” New Statesman and Society 6, no. 240 (19 February 1993): 40-1.

In the following review, Cooke praises Kennedy's nontraditional prose style in Looking for the Possible Dance, commenting that the work stands out as a first novel due to “the quality of its writing from page to page.”

“Could I have a coffee and a wee cup of paraquat?” asks Margaret, whose boss is beginning to get on her nerves. The offer of “a Penguin on the house” isn't much of a comfort, except to the reader, who by now will have the measure of Kennedy's sharp, quirky prose. Her Glaswegian humour—reminiscent of James Kelman's short stories—shines out fitfully, sometimes intensifying towards the surreal but just as often fading before the returning, hazy sense of pain which is the book's [Looking for the Possible Dance] dominant theme.

A student in the 1980s, Margaret has learned...