PanThe Guardian\"These are juicy ideas, and a darker, less earnest novel might have successfully explored them. But Quatro fails to weave the ideas driving the narrative into the actual events, and we veer between a didacticism, in which Maggie intellectualises her desires, and the affair itself, often rendered in language that is cloyingly intimate, insufficiently sieved. The gap leaves the God issue feeling tacked-on and not entirely convincing. There are moments here that have the strength of her stories...But too often, the writing doesn’t hold up.\
Heather O'Neill
PositiveThe GuardianThere is surely a sweet spot where you place just enough obstacles in the path of your protagonists, and O’Neill comes close to missing it. For almost 200 pages, Rose and Pierrot are separated, yearning for each other. There is some wonderful writing along the way, but the innumerable near misses and thwarted meetings pile up to the point of feeling gratuitous. Still, we root for these two, and even as I grew impatient, I admired the novel’s big-heartedness, its defiant affirmation of the whole seedy, sad, beautiful burlesque that is the life of these characters ... This novel is neither gritty realism nor noir, not Dickens nor commedia dell’arte nor dystopian fairytale, but a little bit of all of them.
