"This is a moving and profound novel, exploring the ways in which love counters cruelty in even the harshest of conditions. The characters are beautifully drawn, their feelings and motivations believable and real, their loves alternately heartbreaking and redemptive. Even the minor characters are drawn with the kind of careful detail that makes them spring brilliantly to life." - IndieReader.com
"Quite possibly, the best depiction from a dog's point of view that I've ever read!" - The San Francisco Book Review
"Unmentionables is superb historical fiction with a contemporary angle; an enlightening look at the hidden elements of our past. Five stars." -- Foreword Clarion Review
"Mr. Greene has written a book that is very well researched, has heart and soul, makes you laugh and cry, and get angry and frustrated. ... This is simply a beautiful story." --GGR Review
"In a style that is straightforward without being encyclopedic, poetic without being over-embellished, and informative without being didactic, he achieves that balance of form and content required for a successful, and, in this case, beautiful work of art. " --Gay Persons of Color blog
"I want you to read David Greene's novel Unmentionables, because it is a terrific, life-affirming read. It should have a place in every reader's library, and the sooner you make time to read it the sooner you will share the great experience I've had the past few days.
I'm not going to pigeon-hole Unmentionables by saying "think Gone with the Wind meets Brokeback Mountain," because that wouldn't do justice to the novelist's achievement in recreating a historical world that seems to suggest the impossibilty that he might actually have been present for everything that happened out of Margaret Mitchell's earshot.
One important element of Greene's triumph here is strikingly reminiscent of the great tradition of English novelists from Eliot and Hardy to D.H. Lawrence. Part of what made the English novel of the 19th and early 20th century so compelling was the existence of class and social barriers that locked characters out from opportunities to live their dreams.
American culture has often tended to homogenize our experience and deny the existence of such barriers to focus on less compelling personal idiosyncracies, but the barriers are there, they have always been there, and in Unmentionables Greene gives resonance both to those barriers, to their human cost, and to the passion and nobility that such barriers can inspire in "ordinary people." - Steve Windwalker - Kindle Nation Daily
