The New York Times

Rickie Lee Jones is another completely distinctive singer-songwriter who walked through the fire and lived to tell the tale. But if O’Connor’s sentences and chapters are short and spiky, the language in LAST CHANCE TEXACO: Chronicles of an American Troubador (Grove, 364 pp., $28) is winding and leisurely, as rich and colorful as Jones’s best lyrics. It’s a classically American picaresque tale, a recounting of a life in which she “lived volumes as a young girl long before I was famous.”