Fittingly enough, one of Kincaid's fortes—writing about anger—has earned her extreme critical reactions. One review of My Brother opens this way: "Jamaica Kincaid is great at describing rage." Sarah Kerr, the author of that review, believes that Kincaid's memoir of her brother succeeds because it ultimately moves beyond rage. "Still, rage is only one shade on the spectrum of human experience. Kincaid's new memoir is more expansive than her fiction—and at times more moving—because in it, she begins to explore some of the others."

In one of the more glowing reviews of My Brother, Anna Quindlen praises Kincaid in the New York Times for her ability to recreate the disorderly way human beings remember their lives. "Memory feels exactly like My Brother," Quindlen writes. And later she observes, "Kincaid moves with strange naturalness from the dying of her brother to his birth...