SOURCE: Hutchings, William. Review of A Star Called Henry, by Roddy Doyle. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 594.

In the following review, Hutchings lauds A Star Called Henry as realistic and engrossing novel, though notes that the work contains several passages of confusing surrealism.

Described on its title page as “Volume One of The Last Roundup,” Roddy Doyle's novel A Star Called Henry continues his remarkable series of Dublin-based first-person narratives that has given extraordinarily insightful, lyrical, and poignant voice to characters who, for a variety of reasons, live in the shadows of their society: a ten-year-old child in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1994; see WLT 68:4, p. 810), an abused and alcoholic wife in The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996; see WLT 72:2, p. 386), working-class adolescents in the Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper, and The Van). However, A Star Called Henry is Doyle's first “historical novel,” set in the first...