Consistently charming. --Dorian Fox, Los Angeles Review of Books

In this time of reckoning around race, the past, the present, and the future, Niesslein looks inward, and the result is a candid, unflinching, deeply personal meditation on whiteness, family, and history. These essays are revelatory, raw, and real, everything good storytelling should be. --Deesha Philyaw, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies

Niesslein is a nuanced thinker, and she honors the tremendous complexity of nostalgia in the nine essays contained within this book. --Beth Kephart, Cleaver Magazine

Jennifer Niesslein's fearless, beautiful Dreadful Sorry takes on American myths, childhood memories, family history, and ghosts personal and public with wit, love, and a journalist's flair. This book is a wonder in all the best ways. --Jessica Handler, author of The Magnetic Girl

Niesslein's brilliant ancestral memoir is both searchingly personal and slyly political, and it asks the hardest questions about privilege and its haunting, murderous history. It's a book about longing for the past even as it's also a meditation on the dangers of that very longing, and it's also just a totally delightful read: wryly hilarious and candidly, quietly illuminating. I loved it. --Catherine Newman, author of Waiting for Birdy and How to Be a Person

[A] breezy and charm-filled book. --Brian O'Neill, Chicago Review of Books

[An] inviting and down-to-earth collection. [. . .] With honesty, humor, and an earnest passion that shines through her words, Niesslein reflects upon stories of the past with the hope of a better future. --Kait Walser, Hippocampus MagazineThe true strength of Niesslein's collection [lies] in her deeply personal and lovingly written ruminations on her own memories. --Grace Kennedy, Broad Street Review