PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksKate Elizabeth Russell\'s deeply affecting first novel...is a vivid account of the harm too often done to girls by men ... Russell won’t have the older Vanessa condescend to her younger self, nor will she obscure her innocence with hindsight. The writer demands that the reader witness the molestation as it is happening, and the story is stripped of either judgment or nostalgia ... Russell transforms emotion into words with remarkable precision ... What’s missing, without a reflective voice or the narrative authority of the past tense, is \'emotion recollected in tranquility,\' the old Wordsworthian definition of poetry. There is no tranquility for this narrator ... While Russell is a sure-footed writer with keen powers of description (some of the best sequences detail Vanessa’s job as a file clerk and have nothing to do with sex or obsession), we are not treated to the transcendence that comes when experience is fully transformed into art. There is no childhood to lose because...here is no childhood described. Instead, we experience the loss as Vanessa does, without the bittersweetness of memory — a loss that is real and complete.
