“The book is at once wise and complex, and devastatingly funny … I’ve never read a novel quite like this. Kearney is a unique stylist. Especially given the increasing trend toward arts about AIDS that is either sanitized or mythologized, The Desperates offers a much-needed dose of realness. It’s an important book.”
– lambdaliterary.org

“Kearney’s first novel … is full of the good stuff … Kearney’s gift is to take his often gruesome and truly awful material and spin that darkness into joy … Each life is a weapon that scars whomever posses it, and in laughing through the fear and pain and rage, Kearney urges us to consider the unlikely phenomena of being alive for what it is: something that hurts no matter how tenuously we grasp it, the very same thing so light and soft and brief that we can’t help but find it tickling.”
– National Post

“Hilarious, harrowing and — dare we say? — heartwarming.”
– Xtra Magazine

“An exceptional novel by one of Canada’s most unique literary voices.”
– In Toronto Magazine

“Hilarious, face-twistingly funny … the characters are all long strings of adjectives that don’t always (or even often) meet their own or others’ expectations. And, somehow, Greg Kearney makes that fundamentally okay, not only for them, but for readers as well.”
– Buried in Print