SOURCE: Prose, Francine. “Molly Bloom Said ‘Yes,’ Paula O'Leary Says ‘Maybe.’” Los Angeles Times Book Review (5 May 1996): 3, 8.

In the following review, Prose asserts that The Woman Who Walked into Doors is both poignant and realistic, extolling Doyle's ability to narrate a story from a woman's viewpoint.

Reading The Woman Who Walked into Doors, one almost can't help making chilling comparisons between its tough, buoyant narrator and James Joyce's Molly Bloom. In his new novel, Roddy Doyle (author of The Commitments and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, winner of Britain's Booker Prize) has given us another powerfully memorable Irish woman soliloquizer.

Like the soaring voice that keeps echoing long after the last lines of Ulysses, Doyle's Paula Spencer is at once ordinary and mythical, lyrical and gritty, down to earth and so much larger than life that her personality keeps spilling over the boundary between the spiritual and the...