Shimmering ... Swamy’s storytelling builds almost sneakily, the narration circling and turning, all while her prose mesmerizes. Like a dancer entrancing the audience with her expressive hands while her feet propel her forward.
Sentences undulate until they are brought up short by staccato bursts ... Swamy plays with vibrant textual movement as Vidya awakens to her own art, and follows the coming-of-age touchstones of college, first love and then marriage, with its villainous in-laws. Her prose is so assured that even when long sentences are jostled by abrupt transitions, the effect appears dramatic and deliberate, like a dancer staring directly at the audience for an infinitesimal pause ... The novel also moves deftly among narrative perspectives.
[A] mesmerizingly poetic world ... The Archer's beauty resides in Swamy's sequential narrative form, which reads like music — at times almost exactly like reading a musical score — but with something more; her words carry the visceral power of a dancer's intersection with air. It's a very tough technique to pull off. But Swamy's ability to carve meaning from a lyrical use of narrative brings the reader along with Vidya on her sublime, boundary-pushing exploration ... [Swamy's] new tale of Vidya's emergence unto herself is a beautiful inheritor of that timeless virtuosity.
