Reviews:
"Let’s No One Get Hurt is the evocative story of a free-spirited girl trying to find herself amid memories of her long-gone mother. The story is beautifully and even poetically told in Pearl’s first-person voice . . . The fully developed characters are as memorable as the lovely, sometimes melancholy story they people. A classic coming-of-age novel that lingers with the reader long after the last page."
Booklist (starred review)
"An evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South . . . This stark tale of slow-burning anguish will draw in readers with its lyrical prose and haunting images."
Publishers Weekly
"Set inside the boggy South, Jon Pineda’s Let’s No One Get Hurt is a Venus flytrap of a book: come too close and it just might get you . . . [Pearl's] low-down gallows humor and preternatural wisdom lighten the melancholy of adolescent catastrophe, a subject that the author of this compassionate novel understands quite well . . . If Pineda’s novel has a straight-ahead message, it’s that every place in the South, or America, or anywhere on Earth, is a center of life for someone or some thing: plants bend toward the sun."
Jeff Calder, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Let's No One Get Hurt is a modern coming-of-age story centered on the American South, and there's no doubt that it's destined to be on reading lists for years to come."
Chelsea Adelaine Hassler, PopSugar
"A poet as well as a novelist, Pineda brings an evocative, compressed style to this work, richly mining its resonances."
Nancy McCabe, Ploughshares
"With Let's No One Get Hurt, Jon Pineda offers a wild, yearning, strong-willed protagonist and a novel with both tenderness and violence at its core . . . Pineda's writing is thick with the lush warmth of the American South and the harshness of a life scavenged out-of-doors, and his teenaged girl's perspective is spot-on. This novel of exploration, exploitation and the poetry in it all will stun readers of all kinds, especially those who appreciate strong characters and tough choices."
Shelf Awareness
"A fascinating story of a teenage girl squatting with her father and dealing with the aftershocks of familial trauma in the rural South . . . [Let's No One Get Hurt's] terrific sense of place, haunting character dynamics, and assured narrative voice make it memorable."
Kirkus
"Let’s No One Get Hurt is the evocative story of a free-spirited girl trying to find herself amid memories of her long-gone mother. The story is beautifully and even poetically told in Pearl’s first-person voice . . . The fully developed characters are as memorable as the lovely, sometimes melancholy story they people. A classic coming-of-age novel that lingers with the reader long after the last page."
Booklist (starred review)
"An evocative novel about the cruelty of children and the costs of poverty in the contemporary South . . . This stark tale of slow-burning anguish will draw in readers with its lyrical prose and haunting images."
Publishers Weekly
"Set inside the boggy South, Jon Pineda’s Let’s No One Get Hurt is a Venus flytrap of a book: come too close and it just might get you . . . [Pearl's] low-down gallows humor and preternatural wisdom lighten the melancholy of adolescent catastrophe, a subject that the author of this compassionate novel understands quite well . . . If Pineda’s novel has a straight-ahead message, it’s that every place in the South, or America, or anywhere on Earth, is a center of life for someone or some thing: plants bend toward the sun."
Jeff Calder, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"Let's No One Get Hurt is a modern coming-of-age story centered on the American South, and there's no doubt that it's destined to be on reading lists for years to come."
Chelsea Adelaine Hassler, PopSugar
"A poet as well as a novelist, Pineda brings an evocative, compressed style to this work, richly mining its resonances."
Nancy McCabe, Ploughshares
"With Let's No One Get Hurt, Jon Pineda offers a wild, yearning, strong-willed protagonist and a novel with both tenderness and violence at its core . . . Pineda's writing is thick with the lush warmth of the American South and the harshness of a life scavenged out-of-doors, and his teenaged girl's perspective is spot-on. This novel of exploration, exploitation and the poetry in it all will stun readers of all kinds, especially those who appreciate strong characters and tough choices."
Shelf Awareness
"A fascinating story of a teenage girl squatting with her father and dealing with the aftershocks of familial trauma in the rural South . . . [Let's No One Get Hurt's] terrific sense of place, haunting character dynamics, and assured narrative voice make it memorable."
Kirkus