“Inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining.” – Mark Bowden, New York Times Book Review
“Young is a frank, funny and mercilessly self-lacerating narrator. His writing is entertaining and experimental . . . Eat the Apple is a brilliant and barbed memoir of the Iraq War.” – Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Young matches his stylistic daring with raw honesty, humor, and pathos.” – starred review, Publishers Weekly
“[Young’s] memoir is creatively told in atmospheric and gut-checking essays . . . [his] visceral prose, honed in college and writing programs after his tours of duty, confronts shame, guilt, and pain without flinching yet is beyond sympathetic to its subject; it is another act of service.” – starred review, Booklist
“This honest war memoir will shock and horrify, will cause readers to tear up, and will make them wish they could tell a 19-year-old marine that everything will be okay. Highly recommended.” – starred review, Library Journal
“Here he narrates with cold distance, there he is close and grisly. Some pages are tender and wistful, others repulsive, still others funny. The experimental, jagged account matches the disjointed life of the soldier . . . In writing about war, [Young] has found a purpose and his voice.” – Economist
“[Young] performs a certain amount of literary alchemy, using style and the space between memory and fiction to transform his raw experiences into self-lacerating works of art . . . A real war story told in fragments by a gifted young writer trying to come to grips with his experiences.” – Kirkus Reviews
Matt Young 