Elizabeth Hand (Elizabeth Hand!) reviewed One for Sorrow in the Village Voice:
One for Sorrow, Christopher Barzak’s lovely, melancholy, offbeat first novel, affectingly captures the emotional centrifuge that is adolescence, with sex and longing the fixed axes around which everything else spins. Fifteen-year-old Adam McCormick’s classmate Jamie is too weird and too much of a loner for Adam to befriend—until Jamie is found murdered by the railroad tracks. In the wake of his death, Jamie’s ghost attaches himself first to Gracie, the geeky rock-hound girl who discovers his corpse, and then to Adam, whose grief and guilt are further tangled up with his lust for Gracie.