SOURCE: Smith, Sarah A. “A Nose for Injustice.” New Statesman and Society 8, no. 354 (26 May 1995): 25.

In the following review, Smith comments that, despite her initial trepidation about reviewing a “second novel,” So I Am Glad successfully balances wry social commentary with a well developed plot.

Second novels are, by tradition, difficult to write and disappointing to read. I cannot comment upon the first part of this maxim, but A L Kennedy has destroyed the remainder with a vengeance. So I Am Glad is funny, strange, and almost entirely wonderful. The novel takes the form of a memoir: Jennifer Wilson's recollections of 1993 and 1994, with scenes from her private and professional life. This life is characterised, perhaps unconvincingly, as calm and without spontaneous emotion. It is broken up by “the sudden inconvenient tenderness” of romance. To complicate matters, her unintended beloved is Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, the 17th-century French satirist...