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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Comparisons to The Da Vinci Code are inevitable, but Caldwell and Thomason's book is the more cerebral -- and better written -- of the two: think Dan Brown by way of Donna Tartt and Umberto Eco.
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Outstanding
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Houston Chronicle Lois Zamora
Beautifully written first novel.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Scholarship as romance: intricate, erudite, and intensely pleasurable.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Anthony Grafton
What this ingenious book does highlight, however, is something else new in college fiction: it focuses on the one long hard moment -- a moment many, many bright American undergraduates experience -- when the splendors and miseries of personal existence and the frighteningly powerful appeal of books, problems, and ideas come together in a truly dangerous way.
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Favorable
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Booklist Keir Graff
The authors, best friends since childhood, have made an impressive debut, a coming-of-age novel in the guise of a thriller, packed with history (real and invented) and intellectual excitement. [1 Apr 2004, p.1350]
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Dick Adler
What they do best is show how friendships form and survive, even under the weight of history. [23 May 2004, p.III 2]
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle David Lazarus
As much a blazingly good yarn as it is an exceptional piece of scholarship.
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Favorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Reimer
An ingenious and enjoyable frolic.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Matthew Lewin
An impressive debut - more for the scholarship and erudition of the two authors (one was a history star at Princeton, the other a prize-winning student at Harvard) than for its thrills and chills.
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Favorable
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The Independent Jane Jakeman
The bitcheries of academic life are immaculately observed, in a fascinating glimpse into a secretive modern world: that of the American overclass.
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Favorable
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The New Republic Ingrid D. Rowland
For this intellectual complexity, The Rule of Four belongs to the same genre of action writing as Foucault's Pendulum, although Umberto Eco's novel is even more learned and much more clever.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
The real treat here is the process of discovery, and those passages are written with precision and bravado.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Marilyn Stasio
A marvelous book with a dark Renaissance secret in its coded heart.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker
The most riveting action sequences take place inside the mind.
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Favorable
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Village Voice Ed Park
The secret pleasure here is the way the authors, lifelong friends, have imagined themselves into their novel, a rue-soaked tale of double lives and double meanings.
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Unfavorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Tom Roundell
This collaborative effort by two Princeton alumni does little to breathe life into the formulaic combination of academic intrigue and historical drama.
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Unfavorable
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Entertainment Weekly Troy Patterson
Is it any wonder a novel that views literary interpretation as fancy codework should be strictly by the numbers?
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