PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...[an] inconvenient, untamed, but ultimately brilliant novel ... one of his main projects in this aptly titled novel is plumbing the depths of our wildness, uncovering once and for all the line that separates man from beast. His conclusions — like his vivid prose and tangled plot — are intoxicatingly complex and discomfitingly circular ... The above makes Lagioia’s plot sound hard-boiled, but it is actually meandering, philosophical, and dizzyingly layered. I Am Love meets Toni Morrison, The Godfather meets Love Medicine. The layers not only advance the story but also complicate our understanding of this world of men on the brink and women surrendering to despair ... one of the weaknesses of the novel [:] Because Clara dies in the first chapter, very few pages are devoted to her point of view and the ones that are suffer from a frustrating brand of lyricism doing little to mask the fact that her actions are often contradictory to the point of absurdity.
