MixedThe Irish Times...this is not just another Troubles novel. Burns warns that \'one man\'s surrealism is another man\'s reality here\', and readers would do well to remember this when attempting to comprehend the anarchic ways of the fictional town of Tiptoe Floorboard ... A highly detailed and often convoluted family story follows, in which Burns demonstrates her central theme - the dehumanising effects of violence ... Burns delights in the novel\'s potential for black humour, and sends up Troubles cliches with abandon ... At the heart of the novel lies a belief that the Troubles were little more than criminal activity by atavistic elements ... Whatever the merits of such an assessment, its simplicity is not reflected in the first-person narrative, which all too often is disjointed, tangential, and difficult to comprehend. As a result, a device intended to mirror the anarchy and uncertainty of civil strife has produced a novel that is, sadly, less than the sum of its many parts.
