“If you could return as an adult to the staging ground of your youth—showing people you’d turned out all right after all; taking that Ferris wheel ride with the middle-school crush who’d ignored you; reassuring your parents about how wise, how capable, how worthwhile you were—would you?” (Read the full review here.)

— The New York Times

"Meetings conducted by Al-Anon, the support group for family members of alcoholics, begin with some variant of this greeting, woven from solidarity and sorrow: "We who live, or have lived, with the problem of alcoholism understand as perhaps few others can." What grim knowledge these spouses and children harbor, forced into the contradictory roles of nurse, defender and victim." (Read the full review here.)

— The Washington Post

"Spellbinding... Marvelous... A story of high drama in the court of Nixon-era New England aristocracy... You won't be able to stop reading this book, but when you do finally finish the last delicious page and look up, you will see families in a clearer and more forgiving way."

—Susan Cheever, Vanity Fair

“Electra has a few things to tell us about fathers and daughters. So does Lily King in her searing third novel, Father of the Rain, which excavates the powerful forces of love and dysfunction with staggering aplomb.” (Read the full review here.)

—Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Lily King won a well-deserved raft of honors, including the prestigious Whiting Writer’s Award, for her first two novels, The Pleasing Hour and The English Teacher, and her latest is just as sensitive and perceptive. Indeed, this harrowing chronicle of Daley Amory’s 34-year struggle to come to grips with her impossible father may be her best yet.” (Read the full review here.)

— Chicago Tribune

“You know that moment when the ingénue in the horror movie heads downstairs to check the radiator, and you're screaming, dumbfounded, at the screen? That's the sort of protective rage you feel for Daley Amory, the narrator of Lily King's novel Father of the Rain... Haunting, incisive... King is brilliant when writing from the eyes of a tween, all self-conscious curiosity but bright and hopeful as a starry sky. And as Daley grows up and learns how to trust and to love in spite of herself, King cuts a fine, fluid line to the melancholy truth: Even when we're grown and on our own—wives, mothers, CEOs—we still long to be someone's daughter. The dream of an absent ideal father is like a thick, soft blanket; find one to burrow under, and enjoy.” (Read the full review here.)

—Rachel Rosenblit, Elle