SOURCE: McDermid, Val. “The Sorcerer's Apprentice.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (26 August 2001): 5.

In the following review, McDermid contends that Kennedy's masterful narrative abilities in Everything You Need allow readers to overlook the novel's lapses of plausibility and uncertain ending.

Nathan Staples is a best-selling author of Gothic horror novels. He lives in virtual exile on an island with half a dozen other writers, each of whom is about as socially adept as a porcupine. Nathan is consumed by equal measures of self-loathing, anger and recrimination. But it wasn't always this way. Once, Nathan had a promising career as a literary novelist. He had a wife he adored and a child he worshiped. Then his wife, Maura, decided their marriage that was over and that his unhealthy obsession with his writing meant he should never see his daughter, Mary, again.

Nathan has enough insight to understand that without the...