Reviews and Reaction to Cow Country
....A whimsical and testy romp through the politics and social mores of academia. [...] Fast-paced, ironic, and at times, downright hilarious."
Midwest Book Review (full review)
Cow Country is a zany, innovative addition to the campus novel genre, reminiscent of John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Jane Smiley’s Moo. With his gift for extended metaphor, Pearson transforms the college accreditation process into a multifaceted trope for love, moral growth, even spiritual enlightenment. Required reading for anybody trying to find true love at a regionally accredited community college."
Steven Moore, Author of The Novel: An Alternative History
With quirky characters and impossible situations, Cow Country handles drought, institutional lunacy, racism, and romance with deft insight, as well as keen-edged satirical commentary.”
San Francisco Book Review (full review)
The literary sensibility evident in Cow Country has such a perspectival wash of its own, which saturates the novel’s narrative events, its characters, its concerns, its slackwater moments, its linguistic and philosophical play. [...] Cow Country is at heart a playful novel, side-splittingly funny in a goofy, almost junior-high way, overworking its material far past expected bounds, taking Emily Dickinson’s idea of telling it “slant” and running with it in wild abandon, sometimes to the extent of losing its very breath. Nonetheless, it is clear that an extremely confident sensibility is in control, one neither unpracticed nor hesitant, one that is unabashed when its whim is to temporarily abandon forward narrative inertia for other ends.”
Harper's Magazine (full review)
What makes the book is its great humour. Jones Pearson satirises community colleges and, by extension, the United States. [...] It is all very funny but, behind the humour, there is clearly a serious intent.”
The Modern Novel - A blog (full review)
This novel is much more than a book about the ins and outs of a community college (although doubtless would be highly entertaining to one employed therein), it is a witty investigation of extremism. [...] Coming to a gorgeously grand, but appropriately ridiculous, crescendo, Jones Pearson takes us on a fictional ride that is wryly entertaining, philosophically intriguing, and utterly unique.”
Literary Fiction Book Review (full review)
Brilliant. Cow Country takes readers on an interesting literary journey that displays the author’s writing ability in an extraordinary manner. I truly enjoyed the opportunity of reading this piece.”
Sheila Rowell, English instructor, Central Texas College
Replete with intellectual dialogues and diatribes (...) Cow Country offers an astute observer’s glance not only into our creaking system of higher education, but also into the chaotic and polarized state of an increasingly fractionalized American society."
Mary Greenwell, NYTBR (full review)