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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
Drabble is sleight-of-hand adept at slipping profoundly insightful musings on human nature, history, and social mores into scintillating and all-consuming novels.
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Engrossing and provocative: a scarlet narrative thread reminds us how magical the novel can be in telling stories and lives.
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Outstanding
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Library Journal Mary Margaret Benson
Like Drabble's other novels, this superb story shows signs of her fascination with connections--genetic, historical, and chance-met.
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Nimbly jumping across time and around the globe, Drabble artfully stitches together the disparate strands of both women's lives with "a scarlet thread... of blood and joy."
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle June Sawyers
One of the most inventive works of fiction in recent memory.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Kerry Hardie
The many parallels in the lives of these two women give the book an interesting mirroring effect.
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Y. Euny Hong
Drabble's tale is a quiet love song to literature, an illustration as to how reader and subject become intertwined. As Yeats wrote, how can we know the dancer from the dance?
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
The life-story of Lady Hong is so extraordinary, and Drabble's fascination so infectiously if nervously conveyed, that it cannot fail to absorb the reader.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Lovely, intelligent.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Donna Baily Nurse
Drabble writes exquisitely, but never more so than when she is describing fashion or art.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Maureen Freely
Behind the literary games is an implausible but gorgeously trashy romance. I lapped that up, too - without anyone being the wiser. Rarely has feminist escapism been so stylishly disguised.
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Favorable
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The Independent Charlie Lee-Potter
A delicate, scented fruit, scarred and bruised here and there, but full of life nevertheless.
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Favorable
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The Spectator Francis King
The second half is an entertaining but not all that remarkable novella, part travelogue and part fiction. The first half, on the other hand, as luridly eventful and as stylistically rich as any Jacobean tragedy, shows Drabble in brilliant form.
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Favorable
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Village Voice James Hunter
Her dreamy re-creation of the Crown Princess's exacting voice is extraordinary.
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Favorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Ian Hicks
Drabble develops the Halliwell-van Jost affair with charming tenderness.
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Mixed
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The Guardian David Jays
But both Drabble's ancient and modern Seoul lack the relish and imaginative pragmatism that have recently helped popularise Korean food and movies.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Claudia FitzHerbert
I imagine that Lady Hong comes across as quite something in the original. It is Drabble's dabbling in time travel that has dumbed her down. This is a great pity, not least because the second half of The Red Queen is so much better than the first.
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Mixed
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The Economist
Though the crown princess's memoirs are recounted with grace and intelligence, and though the old professor's seduction of the strapping young lecturer is enjoyable, it is difficult for the reader ever to lose sight of the contrivance.
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Unfavorable
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Washington Post Carolyn See
I had a lot of trouble with this book. The modern anachronisms in the first half. The travel-magazine material in the second. (Do we really need to know in such detail about ladies' public toilets in contemporary Seoul?) I disliked the British self-love that makes England the very center of the cultural universe.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Richard Eder
What we are left with are two narratives entirely separate in style and content, and two voices that never really connect. As for tragicomedy, there's no breath of humor in the princess' stiffly told story and hardly a splinter of irony.
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