MixedThe New York TimesWhile the novel is infused with an operatic sensibility, it doesn’t feel like an opera — there’s little transcendental magic or soaring tragedy ... But the story and the murky mystery within it take off in the fourth act, in a dark and hungry city devastated during the siege of Paris and the Commune. Here, the narrator’s dissociated voice is more suited to her horror at the corpses in the streets, the blood in the fountains.
