PositiveSydney Review of Books (AUS)Wood can be unflinching in her depiction of her characters’ flaws, so that her reader must sometimes do some excavation to find their best qualities. Here she’s struck just the right balance: none of these women is always easily likeable, but each is drawn with insight and sensitivity ... The narrative has a taut, restless energy, and a burgeoning sense of claustrophobia ... Wood’s writing continues to grow in assurance which each new work: never fussy, but grounded, and intensely physical; she prefers metaphor to simile, and it lends her prose a sense of immediacy ... While some of this material could have been heavy-handed, Wood makes it work, revealing the outsized forces of nature, the irresistible tides and encroaching horrors, that are part and parcel of our experience of the world.
