RaveSlate\"...[The] characters—drawn by Lacey in quick, vivid sketches—are flashes on the canvas, as is the landscape, which Elyria, so stuck in the mire of her own thoughts, mostly ignores. As she wanders, her mind whorls and spills, but in Lacey’s hands these are controlled spills: She guides us seamlessly from present to past, revealing piece by piece the grievances and wounds that impelled Elyria toward flight ... Have I mentioned that this book is a comedy? And it is funny, not in a zany way, but in the audaciously morbid way a Coen brothers picture is funny, or the way Six Feet Under was funny, all those people preoccupied by death able, in their daydreams, to break into joyous, hand-wagging song ... Lacey adroitly treads the line between the poignant and the comic, and evokes beautifully the weird intrusiveness of memory, its suddenness and randomness ... Her language pulses and breathes, and although she periodically pushes it a beat too far ... In the course of one passage, she can flit from disaffection and despond to absurdity and tenderness and back again ... [a] wise and dazzling novel...
