PositiveThe New YorkerWe do hear Anette, loud and clear. She narrates some of the novel’s best passages in a dialect that is both inventive and fluid ... I wish Yanique had written more of the novel in that voice. Instead, she jumps erratically from one character’s mind to the next, in a way that can feel unbalanced. Perhaps that was her aim. Yanique makes it clear from the beginning that she is not interested in the framing and cornicing of realism ... Yanique, meanwhile, brings the natural world of the Virgin Islands into high relief, with similes that seem to erupt effortlessly from the lushness of her prose ... Yanique brings reams of this spoken lore to the page.
