SOURCE: Petro, Pamela. “School of Wales.” Women's Review of Books 18, nos. 10-11 (July 2001): 30.

In the following review, Petro compliments both the main storyline and the peripheral stories of the supporting characters in Everything You Need.

As its title suggests, Everything You Need strives to be an all-encompassing book: a big, exhaustive, no-stone-unturned examination of the tidal rhythms of romantic and familial love, of professional accomplishment, self-respect and life passing into death and flowing back as memory. And for the most part, Scottish writer A. L. Kennedy's latest work of fiction, her third, succeeds magnificently. Her last novel, So I Am Glad (1995), drew its strength from its personality-saturated, first-person narration and its tight, claustrophobic mystery: was its hero, an amnesiac holed up in a Glasgow rooming house, really an incarnation of the seventeenth-century Frenchman, Cyrano de Bergerac? By contrast, Everything You Need employs an old-fashioned throng of eccentric characters...