MixedThe San Francisco ChronicleThe strength of this novel is its shifting point of view. Butler moves easily among his characters to create a composite portrait of a family that has been wrecked by choices made during the Vietnam War ... The death of a patriarch, the roles of men and women — these contribute to the novel’s old-fashioned atmosphere. The same is true of the novel’s depiction of the Vietnam War era, which has already been well worn not just in Butler’s previous work but in so many books and movies about that time period ... All of this might have been gotten away with 25 years ago, but our thinking about the war, as well as our thinking about how we write about race, sex and gender, have become more nuanced and complex.
