The 14 pieces in this collection showcase the skills of a master—of the ironic, the absurd, the tragic—forced by the confines of the form to shed his characteristic indulgences in favor of precision-cut narratives.
—The Washington Post

In the past Mr. Boyle has often told such tall tales in order to make some blackly humorous points about the dark side of the American dream and the surreal nature of history in the late 20th century, as the country lurched from the counterculture '60s and '70s into the greed-is-good '80s and '90s. In this volume, however, you get the sense that he has no larger philosophical point to make, that he is simply bent on entertaining the reader—on delivering some good, old-fashioned, funny-suspenseful-head-shaking stories.
—The New York Times

T. C. Boyle, like the megalomaniac American overachievers at the heart of his muscular, quasi-historical novels The Road to Wellville, The Inner Circle, and last year’s The Women, runs on a powerful mix of ambition and brilliance. The title novella of Wild Child, Boyle’s energetic, engaging ninth collection of short stories…[is] a vivid reimagining of the story of the enfant sauvage of Aveyron…the thirteen other stories in Wild Child [are] almost all attention-grabbers…Each of the tales in this entertaining collection show us what the driver in ‘La Conchita’ calls ‘the real deal’—things that really matter.”

Dazzling…Boyle [is] that literary wild child whose flights of narrative fancy refuse to be domesticated.”

The title novella in Boyle’s ninth collection is as good as anything the prolific author of The Women has written…Boyle interrogates history with an experienced reader’s wariness of sentimental revisionism and a great writer’s attention to precisely what defines the child’s wildness.”

Superlative author T. C. Boyle is also an excellent reader of his own work. His voice is purely American West—flat-voweled , pleasantly modulated, with a hint of a baritone growl. He reads without vocal flourish, but with an intensity that captures the listener and won’t let go. It’s pell-mell without being rushed; urgent but not desperate; entirely articulate. And such stories. The fate of a boy who cannot feel pain; the way in which a California mudslide can save a soul; a girl who may or may not lie for her father. Stories that feel simultaneously quotidian and mythic…This is a mesmerizing audiobook experience.”