"Ms. Norris, who has a dirty laugh that evokes late nights and Scotch, is…like the worldly aunt who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving and whispers that it is all right to occasionally flout the rules." -- Sarah Lyall (New York Times) "[P]ure porn for word nerds." -- Allan Fallow (Washington Post) "Brims with wit, personality-and commas. Norris' enthusiasm is infectious. She's as passionate about sharp pencils as she is about sharp writing. Delightful." -- Heller McAlpin (NPR Books) "Mary Norris has an enthusiasm for the proper use of language that's contagious.
Her memoir is so engaging, in fact, that it's easy to forget you're learning things." -- People "Wonderfully confiding." -- Miriam Krule (Slate) "[A] winningly tender, funny reckoning with labor and language." -- Megan O'Grady (Vogue) "Funny and endearing." -- Joanna Connors (Cleveland Plain Dealer) "Laugh-out-loud funny and wise and compelling from beginning to end." -- Steve Weinberg (Houston Chronicle) "Smart and funny and soulful and effortlessly illuminating." -- Ian Frazier "Mary Norris brings a tough-minded, clear-eyed, fine-tuned wisdom to all the perplexities and traps and terrors of the English sentence." -- Adam Gopnik "Mary Norris is a grammar geek with a streak of mischief, and her book is obscenely fun.
" -- Marilyn Johnson "This is as entertaining as grammar can be. Very very. Read it and savor it." -- Garrison Keillor "Mary Norris is the verbal diagnostician I would turn to for a first, second, or third opinion on just about anything." -- John McPhee, in The New Yorker "There is so much to be learned from Mary Norris''s marvelous memoir: she tells us when to hyphenate a compound noun, shows whether to employ the subjunctive, and elucidates the suggestively named copulative verb. But she is no dry guardian of grammar, no punitive Poobah of punctuation. In giving an account of her journey from provincial obscurity to the glamour of New York-and -she offers a warm, tender, and funny coming of age story. (Or possibly it''s a ''coming-of-age'' story.
Mary could tell you.)" -- Rebecca Mead "Destined to become an instant classic…. It's hard to imagine the reader who would not enjoy spending time with Norris." -- Christian Science Monitor.