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Baltimore Sun "Donner's writing is nothing short of gorgeous, alive to the intricate hostilities between girls and the tangled alliances among women. The compassion she summons for the desperately sad children in this book is nearly crushing in its intensity. This is a remarkable debut." Read more...
Gulf Coast "This fine first novel, set in Los Angeles in 1983, examines at close range the intimate joys and harrowing risks of a childhood lived on the social margins...Sunset Terrace is an unsentimental chronicle of California dreams deferred, the desperation of lives lived just outside the frame." Read more...
Kirkus Reviews "A migratory mother flirts with stability in first-timer Donner's strongly realized novel of place." Read more...
Publisher's Weekly "A family puts down roots in a hardscrabble Southern California apartment complex in this colorful, wonderfully realized first novel." Read more...
The Oregonian "Rebecca Donner's debut novel, Sunset Terrace, is the story of a grief-stricken mother putting her life back together in Los Angeles, and the daughter disappearing into the shadows of emotional isolation." Read more...
David Gates, author of Jernigan "In Sunset Terrace, Rebecca Donner manages to combine the affectionate and the painful, a sharp eye for the minute detail and a firm sense of narrative architecture. From its first sad-funny and skeptical sentence, Sunset Terrace shows a smart and compassionate sensibility at work."
Matthew Sharpe, author of The Sleeping Father "It's difficult to write about children in a way that is both true to childhood and of serious literary interest to adult readers, but in her first novel, Rebecca Donner accomplishes this feat with pathos and finesse. She also writes compellingly of the rough texture of subsistence living in America during the so-called economic boom of the 1980s. These are two of the many triumphs of Sunset Terrace."