SOURCE: Heinegg, Peter. “You Still Can't Get There from Here.” America 187, no. 12 (21 October 2002): 26.

In the following review, Heinegg compliments Russo's deadpan comedic timing in The Whore's Child and Other Stories.

Right beneath the title, the jacket of The Whore's Child displays a bare black cross; and we soon discover why. The subject of the title story is, of all things, an aging nun whose beloved absent father turns out to have been her (hated) mother's pimp. What the embittered Sister Veronique has in common with most of the cast in the remaining six tales (or novellas) in this collection is her more or less permanent, but wholly un-redemptive pain. Not for nothing was this homely, engaging novelist raised a Catholic in Johnstown, N.Y. Richard Russo's heroes tend to be bewildered boys whose parents' failed marriages get even more dismal when, faute de mieux, they reconcile (“Joy Ride...