"...the personalities in this remarkable book are like Faulknerian characters. The lost cause of the Confederacy is still alive in one of the Deep South backwaters of apartheid that hasn't caught up with Federal civil rights laws...No, PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK isn't a novel: it is a highly original work of sociology with elements of what we seek in serious fiction. There is a landscape of mystery in coastal Georgia: a Robin Hood-like sheriff who owns four houses and his own airfield but is otherwise a charming good old boy; the first black county commissioner since Reconstruction; a handfull of heroic white Legal Services lawyers charging into town...
"One other factor makes PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK rare for a book rooted in oral history: it is sylishly written... her imagery and selectivity come alive...in this imaginative work of nonfiction."
Herbert Mitgang, THE NEW YORK TIMES, November 20, 1991

"Everyone has a story, and if you wait long enough, you just might get to hear it. For 15 years, Melissa Fay Greene waited and listened to the stories of McIntosh County, Georgia -- black, white, young, old and down-right ancient. She heard Henry Curry talk about his wife of 66 years: "There's always something about an individual you aint never going to know"; and Fanny Palmer talk about praying for Sheetrock so she could finish her house and not freeze to death. She heard the attorneys who had worked in Georgia Legal Services talk about creating social change and "the biggest bang for the buck." Thurnell Alston, the disabled boilermaker who helped drag the poorest county in Georgia into the 20th century, talked about the sheriff: 'I think everybody in the county knew the sheriff had people killed. He was too powerful to do it himself. He always have somebody to have it done.'
"The result of all this talking -- 'the numberless secret and eccentric tales' -- is PRAYING FOR SHEETROCK, a monumental social history with implications that go far beyond the borders of a tiny coastal Georgia county. Through a combination of oral history and interpretive narrative, Greene has created a work of great drama, a chorus of voices that is both disturbing and inspiring."
THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE, September 29, 1991

"Let there be no suspense about my reaction to this book. I intend to try to make a joyful noise here. Melissa Fay Greene has written a superb account of life and struggle in a tiny place. Because of its themes and the brilliant way the author has handled them, this book could stand as a metaphor for the halting American effort to become something better than we have been... Most of all, it is a story of simple black people enduring and rising very, very slowly and then a little faster on the broad back of a flawed leader who ultimately breaks because he is human and has aspirations and burdens that push him past his limits. 
"The blacks encountered in this book are the kind of people one almost never sees and whose lives cannot be imagined... They are the kind of rural black people whom I see walking in the withering summer heat on the side of the highway as I hurtle in my air-conditioned car down U.S. 13 on the Eastern Shore of Virginia toward Norfolk. I say to myself, 'They're not far out of slavery, those people; I wonder what they know and think and remember.'
"Well, Melissa Fay Greene tells us. And how she tells us!"
Roger Wilkins, LOS ANGELES TIMES, Sunday, December 15, 1991

"The facts and much more spring to life in Melissa Fay Greene's dazzling first book...The civil rights movement will never look quite the same."
Michael P. Johnson, THE NATION, December 23, 1991

"There is nothing conventional about the book...Libraries may have difficulty classifying it, but I will keep it on the shelf next to James Agee, another irreverent natural writer who tried, through his appetite for life and language, to drive inconsequence from the world."
Theodore Rosengarten, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, Nov. 3, 1991

"A beautifully written and absolutely authentic picture of the rural South."
Kirkus Reviews, August 15, 1991

"In prose that is both sharp and elegaic, Melissa Fay Greene catches the pitch of a voice, the simmering heat and the tensions of human contact. But she also catches the essential unity of the human experience of this insidiously beautiful, treacherous land with its history that is both placid and bloodstained."
Godfrey Hodgson, THE INDEPENDENT, London, 1 August 1992

"...a luridly entertaining nonfiction debut... a cautionary tale as wonderfully knotty as a plank of Georgia pine..."
Malcolm Jones, Jr., NEWSWEEK, January 20, 1992

"Greene's achievement recalls Jane Austen's description of her novels as fine brushwork on a 'little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory'... What Greene has written is political history of a rare kind..."
James Lardner, THE NEW YORKER, April 13, 1992

"Melissa Greene is a journalist who writes with the lyricism of a poet and the skill of a novelist... She is an extraordinarily fine writer able to bring a people and a place to life without sentimentalizing or refashioning human beings into heroes and villains. She knows it is enough to be human. Her writing is characterized by a genuine love of whom and what she is writing about as well as a genuine love for the act of writing itself. This is a rare combination and the result is a rare reading experience."
Julius Lester, THE WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD, November 24, 1991