The New York Times - Dwight Garner
It's interesting to imagine an alternative history of African-American fiction in which this wild, satirical and pathbreaking feminist picaresque caught the ride it deserved in the culture. Today it would be where it belongs, up among the 20th century's lemony comic classics, novels that range from Lucky Jim and Cold Comfort Farm to Catch-22 and A Confederacy of Dunces…in Oreo Ms. Ross is simply flat-out fearless and funny and sexy and sublime…Her throwaway lines have more zing than most comic writers' studied arias…Oreo is acid social criticism, potent because it is lightly worn…Oreo has snap and whimsy to burn. It's a nonstop outbound flight to a certain kind of readerly bliss.
Chicago Tribune - John Warner
"Think: Thomas Pynchon meets Don Quixote, mixed with a crack joke crafter. I'm not sure I've ever admired a book's inventiveness and soul more."
Public Books - Michelle Latiolais
"Oreo is a blissful antidote to the cant of today and a celebration of the intricacies of consciousness; it encounters no boundary."
The New York Times - Adam Bradley
"Oreo is satire and metafiction, a picaresque and a bildungsroman."
The New York Times - Paul Auster
"What a rollicking little masterpiece this book is, truly one of the most delightful, hilarious, intelligent novels I’ve stumbled across in recent years, a wholly original work written in a wonderful mashed-up language that mixes high academic prose, black slang and Yiddish to great effect. I must have laughed out loud a hundred times, and it’s a short book, just over 200 pages, which averages out to one booming gut-laugh every other page."
Vanity Fair
"Hilarious, touching and a future classic."
Bookforum
"This is a novel that refuses to be categorized or tamed in any way."
Essence Magazine
"Hilariously offbeat. "
Guardian - Marlon James
"Oreo buzzes with whip-smart comic ferocity. The book is just goddamn funny. Oreo laughs in the face of the American one-drop ideal of whiteness that produces Oreos in the first place. It revels in yet mocks its own hybridity, and that of the characters. It pulls off the unique trick of slapping white supremacy in the face, while never letting go of the ideal of (and the desire for) whiteness itself. The novel’s constant dialectical tension recalls jazz itself. Free jazz, intentionally playing with poetry and cacophony, music and noise, meaning and nonsense, black and Jewish. It’s a novel that reads as the smartest and wildest conversation you’ve ever had, with the friend that’s too smart for her own good. Oreo’s time is most certainly now. Because, more than ever, with the real world skidding off into madness, absurdity and chaos, this crazy, sexy, cool novel now makes perfect sense."
The New York Times - Paul Beatty
"It took me two years to "feel" Wu Tang's first album, even longer to appreciate Basquiat, and I still don't get all the fuss over Duke Ellington and Frank Lloyd Wright. But I couldn't believe Oreo hadn't been on my cultural radar."
Bookforum - Susan Choi
"I wish that more writers writing today would be as outrageous, irreverent, and just flat-out funny about race as Fran Ross was in Oreo almost fifty years ago."
Harryette Mullen
"With its mix of vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic humor, inside jokes, neologisms, verbal quirks, and linguistic oddities, Ross's novel dazzles…"
LitHub - Stephen Sparks
"Uproariously funny…criminally neglected."
NPR Books - Mat Johnson
"Oreo is one of the funniest books I've ever read. To convey Oreo's humor effectively, I would have to use the comedic graphs, menus, and quizzes Ross uses in the novel. So instead, I just settle for, 'You have to read this.'"
The Atlantic - Ilana Masad
"Oreo is a wonderfully irreverent story that plays fast and loose with the hero’s journey. Tragically, it’s the only novel Fran Ross ever published."
The Guardian - Danielle Dutton
"Setting out from her black household in Philadelphia to find her deadbeat Jewish father in New York, [Oreo] proceeds through one of the funniest journeys ever, amid a whirlwind of wisecracks in a churning mix of Yiddish, black vernacular, and every sort of English."
The Literary Review - Amanda Sarasien
"The novel will endure, greeting each new generation of readers with its continuing relevance."
From the Publisher
"Fran Ross has a witty way with words-Yiddish, black dialect, puns-and she strews them exuberantly throughout her episodic story, along with lists, tables, drawings, equations, menus ('Gefuellte Melonen') and Q-and-A exams." —Publishers Weekly
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2015-04-29
A biracial girl brought up by her black grandparents sets off on a quest to find her long-lost Jewish father in Ross' brilliant and biting satire. Helen "Honeychile" Clark and Samuel Schwartz met, married (over the mutual disapproval of their parents), and divorced before their daughter Oreo's second birthday. With Helen, a pianist, away on perpetual tour and Samuel generally absent, Oreo (real name: Christine) and her brother, Jimmie C. (real name: Moishe), are raised by their maternal grandparents in Philadelphia. But while Oreo's father has disappeared almost entirely from his daughter's life ("he's a schmuck," Helen explains, when Oreo asks), he's left behind one thing: a note, delivered to Helen and intended for the future Christine. When she "is old enough to decipher the clues written on this piece of paper," he says, "send her to me and I will reveal to her the secret of her birth." And so, after a precocious childhood, during which she's steeped in language—Yiddish from her grandfather (a committed anti-Semite, his business is selling outrageously overpriced mail-order schlock to Jews); English from her tutor, a "renowned linguist and blood donor"; and "Louise-ese," the distinct dialect of her grandmother, to name a few—Oreo leaves home, lunch packed, to embark upon her mission: find her father, learn the secret. Transforming the myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth into a feminist picaresque, Ross sends Oreo into the heart of New York City, where, in a series of absurd, unsettling, and hilarious encounters—no one is safe from Ross' razor-sharp deconstruction—she inches ever closer to her own origin story. Oreo's identity is always in flux, as she performs various personas to suit her situations, switching between registers with superhuman skill. First published in 1974 and now reissued in paperback, Ross' novel, with its Joycean language games and keen social critique, is as playful as it is profound. Criminally overlooked. A knockout.
