"The description of Cricket’s Last Stand is the one time in this howlingly dull book that Noem demonstrates any sense of setting, character, plot and emotional honesty...."

"Picture it: Harvest season... hunting season.... She does everything possible to make sure friends from Georgia bag some pheasants, but Cricket — 'out of her mind with excitement' — ruins everything. 'I was livid,' Noem writes. Then, on the way home from that disaster, Cricket attacks some beloved, irreplaceable chickens at a neighbors’ house. The mother — holding a baby, no less! — runs toward the melee, sobbing: 'My chickens! No, not my chickens!' Noem pays for the birds and hauls Cricket into her truck. 'She whipped around to bite me,' she says. 'I hated that dog.'...  For a few glorious pages, Noem feels like a Flannery O’Connor character...."

Writes Ron Charles, in "Kristi Noem’s dog killing is pure Southern gothic/A literary critic’s take on the South Dakota governor’s memoir, 'No Going Back'" (WaPo).

It's not as though Charles likes the book — which is, "mostly a hodgepodge of worn chestnuts and conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge" — and he certainly doesn't approve of Noem's killing the dog. It's just that the rest of the book is the usual unreadable nothingness.