RaveObserver[Pham\'s] observations span a lot of ground — night runs on Yale’s campus, a painting course in France, a residency in New Mexico, each place an astute rendering from a definitive voice ... Her tone is steeped in millennialisms, with chapters occasionally beginning in sentence fragments, but Pham tries neither to dismiss the context of her Internet upbringing nor to over explain it. She describes the particularities of her formative years online through anecdotes that are fittingly visual ... wherever Pham looks, her gaze is ceaselessly empathetic, and it is this generosity that binds the reader to her quest for understanding ... The abundance of artistic references is surely important to the book’s goal, but her criticism sometimes gets away from us in an overly sentimental lyricism. Nonetheless, the book emits kindness, and even with all the pain of heartbreak, violence and loss, Pham manages to generate sincere hopefulness.
Rachel Cusk
PositiveThe ObserverCusk loves to make metaphors out of a space’s vastness, where a landscape illuminates the drama of the narrator’s life: an unending sky that makes miniatures of airplanes, an ocean that drops its contents off at the horizon ... Like always, Cusk writes about narrative as such, namely its trappings, which the marsh offers to solve by transcendence ... Cusk continues her struggle with issues of power, but often slips into easily-drawn essentialisms that do little to provoke more nuanced critique ... Cusk’s successes come by way of mood, and tension rings at a dissonant pitch throughout the novel ... The novel’s inquiries into art and truth wrap the whole book in slippery significance; just as something gets worked out, it is broken down again, shards blending in with the ground.
