“…a remarkable little novel … Almost all of Ingalls’s stories evoke an atmosphere of breathless expectancy: something wonderful or horrid seems always about to happen. This tone of suspense often has a menacing quality, paying off at the last minute in appalling reversals of fortune and explosions of spectacular violence … It is a tribute to the subtlety of the novel that it can lend itself to multiple readings … Perhaps Ingalls’s finest accomplishment in the novel is the unflappable gentleness of her tone, which records supernatural surprise and flaming horror simply, almost tranquilly. The result is paradoxically quotidian and dreamlike, like a fable or folktale … One can only hope that this new edition, and the possible film adaptation, will bring to this austere, elegant work—and to Ingalls’s fiction more generally—the sustained attention it so richly deserves.”
–Rob Latham, The Los Angeles Review of Books, November 28, 2017
