When your book comes out, you hope for reviews to appear. You never know exactly where reviews will come from or when, and sometimes, you even wait for reviews that never post. When a review does come online, you then hope that it’s positive, or at the very least, that the reviewer read the book well and gets it.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate that the five reviews Happy Talk has received so far have been positive, spectacular even. Here are bites from a new one from Shelf Awareness. All I can think is I’m not worthy:

If the late, great William Gaddis decided to haunt a guy who was possessed by Joseph Heller, that guy would be Richard Melo. How else can one explain Happy Talk? There has to be some dark, supernatural force behind this dialogue-based satire saturated in humor and wit.

Unabashedly hilarious and thoughtful in the way post-modernism used to be, Melo writes imaginative action sequences, delivers wonderwork prose and captures the voices of his characters like a fine tuned medium. Happy Talk is a rare feat–experimental and a joy to read.