SOURCE: Birch, Dinah. “Warming My Hands and Telling Lies.” London Review of Books 17, no. 15 (3 August 1995): 17.

In the following review, Birch explores recurring thematic motifs in Kennedy's writing and offers a positive assessment of the optimistic and hopeful ending of So I Am Glad.

One of the most convincing inclusions in Granta's list of the 20 best young British novelists, A. L. Kennedy, has composed a distinctive voice out of youth and national identity. She was born in Dundee, and now lives in Glasgow; Scottishness informs her fiction. This is partly a matter of a characteristic introspection, the tradition of spiritual autobiography that generated the novel in the first place and has never, in the hard climate of Scotland, quite lost its original impetus:

Little comes more naturally to me and my kind than guilt. Devoid of feeling, yes. Devoid of guilt, never. I'm sure even Scottish sociopaths are soaked...