SOURCE: Carroll, Michael. “Gothic Irony.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (2 May 1999): 7.

In the following review of Werewolves in Their Youth, Carroll offers high praise for Chabon's skillful craftsmanship, elegant prose, complex descriptions, and effective use of figurative language.

A young father haunted by a libidinous past is confronted by the need for real intimacy with his daughter. A couple troubled by an emptiness at the center of their relationship waver on the verge of buying their first house. Two schoolboys with only a single property line and their fatherless suburban households in common meet briefly on the invisible borders of their misfit imaginations and are separated again by the hairy hand of fate. A maturing woman who has spent years of her marriage struggling to have a child is attacked and impregnated by a serial rapist but decides against her husband's wishes not to have an abortion, sending...