PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)The voice is cool and the gaze is clear: Howland doesn’t \'indulge\' in reflections on her trauma or make any attempts to romanticise her illness—instead her focus is outwards, onto the ward and her fellow patients. It is a startlingly frank account of mental illness, and the contradictions and humiliations of life as a patient. In fact, the least modern thing about it might be that frankness—Howland is plainly unhampered by the need to watch her language ... It goes on. Perhaps for too long. We shuffle from one character to another, in a relentless—even exhausting—litany of minute detail. The compound effect Howland achieves of all this individual strangeness is that it begins to look ordinary. Before long the reader is thoroughly accustomed to the institutional life that the author experienced ... Howland, meanwhile, remains shadowy: there is no exploration of her inner world, no prism through which our view is filtered. The book has no narrative shape to speak of. It takes some time to work out what she is doing ... But Howland is right to suspect that it is in the small particulars that real insights emerge ... As you near the end the mystery of her absence from the pages begins to solve itself: she views her treatment, and the chronicling of it, as a form of self-escape. When she does give us details, it is as a kind of exorcism.
