“Karapanou” write[s] of childhood with such lyric ferocity; her ‘Kassandra and the Wolf’ has [a] jagged fantastic substance” with a vicious pre-pubescent sexual element chillingly added.” — John Updike, New York Times

“A frank, poetic, uncluttered graph of the state of childhood.” — Edna O’Brien

“No retelling of Kassandra and the Wolf can explain its charm, or its riddles… [It] is one of those rare creations that come alive mysteriously, without any antecedents. The book is original, terrifying, complete. It invents its own history, eases in and out of nightmare as it mingles dream and fact. Kassandra and the Wolf is a short, muscular novel with an absolute sense of craft… The language throughout is merciless and crisp…. [A] stunning achievement: a lovely, sinister book.” — Jerome Charyn, The New York Times

“To read these two experimental works is to realize the magnitude of the loss when Greek novelist Margarita Karapanou died quite suddenly in 2008. ‘Kassandra’ offers a disturbing portrait of childhood. A six year old girl, a stutterer, is victimized by sexual abuse she cannot begin to fathom, her vocabulary drawn from the lurid imagery of fairy tales (the wolf). So brutalized, Kassandra cannot express emotions: given a doll to love, she cuts off its legs and arms; given a kitten to tend, she beats it, drowns it, and then lovingly wraps it in a blanket. The novel disquiets, un-eases, disturbs, but intrigues. There is a coolness to its execution, Karapanou’s testing of the limited perceptions of an emotionally damaged child who cannot speak for herself compels focus less on harrowing events and more on their translation into lyric story. The same is true of the later work, ‘Rien ne va plus.’ Karapanou executes a deft experiment that suspends events between experience and their redesign into fiction. ” — Review of Contemporary Fiction, Joseph Dewey