“Secret Love demonstrates [Schneider’s] keen ear for dialogue, and flair for summoning up difficult emotions with droll precision. . . . Most importantly, Schneider makes us care about the well-meaning but conflicted people he conjures. And he makes us wonder how they will navigate the tides of change lapping at their heels.”—Seattle Times
“Deftly painting four lives and loves into a sometimes sun-bleached, sometimes fog-shrouded portrait of a city convulsed by anger and desire, Secret Love precisely balances the charms of a lyrical love story against the muscular potency of political and social upheaval.”
—Out!
“This unusual tender-tough novel deals with the intricacies of two different though similarly fraught interracial relationships . . . the prose is strong and unpretentious, and the stance is refreshingly free of sentimentality.”
—Lambda Book Report
“Once again, Schneider recreates an era of great promise and uncertainty, when civil rights legislation is on the table but mixed race couples are still targets of open hatred and violence. . . . A cast of well-drawn characters, likeable yet flawed, makes this lively narrative more than just a tale of love against the odds. . . . Secret Love’s tale of personal upheaval makes a lasting impression.”
—Time Out New York
“Schneider seems well on his way to making the San Francisco of the 1960s and ‘70s his own personal Yoknapatapha County. Not only does he evoke the streets of the city with an almost poetic precision, he populates his fictional world with characters who capture both the energy and the ambiguity of the place and times. . . . What makes the novel soar is the intimacy with which he portrays individuals in love and pain. Like Baldwin in Another Country—a novel this one evokes in both its spirit and its passion—Schneider uses the drama of forbidden relationships as a way of approaching his real subject—the human heart in turmoil.”
—Booklist
“Hip, soulful . .irresistible . . . Secret Love is simultaneously a love story and a fine-grained investigation of race relations . . . Schneider is a savvy and empathetic writer . . He leaps into his characters’ souls with the brashness of a bop trumpeter [and] is unafraid to splatter vulnerability and big, messy, accurate emotions all over his canvas.”
—New York Times Book Review
“The urge to flutter, to preen, to spread, to indulge, to do exactly what you want, itches through every line of this fine novel. The ‘60s are coming. The reader knows that; the characters don’t. . . . This extraordinary novel explores our deepest yearnings for joy and self-realization.”
—Washington Post
“One strength of Schneider’s storytelling is that he preserves the language and sentiments of the era. Another is that he writes with such obvious affection for this time and place, without ever letting it burden his book or blind him to their realities.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune