RaveThe Times (UK)Impressive ... As an experiment in biography, it is strikingly accomplished; as a tale of literary intrigue, it is utterly compelling ... Wade is skilful at sifting through quantities of material and finding illumination in the ephemeral and the everyday ... Wade approaches such contradictions with openness, and the Stein that emerges for her is eccentric, flawed, vulnerable and funny ... Rich and moving.
Rosalind Brown
MixedTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Elegantly paced ... A feat, a performance of attention, and it is often very funny. But as the novel draws to a close we are left wondering how appealing it is ... Often I felt trapped with Annabel in her narrow room. Where the author fetishizes discipline, she inadvertently cautions against its brittleness and gloom.
Selby Wynn Schwartz
RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Wynn Schwartz makes use of a multitude of literary sources, though she rarely quotes directly. Instead she practises a kind of ventriloquism, not quite fictive, and at the same time subverting the genres of biography and literary criticism. Her style might be called hybrid, though the label doesn’t capture the pleasures of its originality or inventiveness ... Some reviewers have questioned the ethics of moving so freely between fact and fiction in writing these women’s lives. In an extended biographical note the author describes her fragments as “speculative biographies”, and this feels closest to the truth ... It is a quietly radical technique, and not without risk. But Wynn Schwartz pulls it off. How else, these writers ask, to account for the lives of the unaccounted?
