MixedThe A.V. Club\"At its sharpest, Wayward channels the feeling that modern life is too fragmented, too distorted to take in fully, much less bend to one’s will. Unfortunately, it often lapses into plotting and conversation so labored and deliberate as to reduce what could be tragedy to mere farce ... That inattention, that inability to see who and what is in front of us, is at the center of Wayward’s most compelling pieces ... too frequently, Wayward strays from that feeling of alienation and into the numbingly obvious. The conversations Sam has with acquaintances about the political state of the world in 2017...are excruciatingly free of subtext or variation ... For all her immense talent, Spiotta has never been a particularly adept writer of dialogue. Hers is often too stilted to be convincingly natural, yet not distinct enough to be truly stylized ... Though the book fails when it attempts, as it so frequently does, to diagnose the current moment, it occasionally taps into something more eternal, and much more unnerving.\
