RaveThe Los Angeles TimesEnright has written a wonderfully elegant and unsparing novel that takes the old Irish subjects of family dysfunction and the vagaries of memory into territory made fresh by an objectivity so precise it seems almost loving in its care … One of Enright's great strengths is her ability to take the conventions, stage settings and stock characters of Irish fiction and dip them in the acid of a sensibility utterly immune to piety or cant, religious or cultural. This is work as suspicious of the newly unsentimental, tell-all Ireland as it is of the ‘Hidden Ireland's’ old reticence and verities. An experienced reader recognizes a lot of Irish types and tropes in an Enright novel, then realizes they've never seen them in this light before. Thus, while the now requisite, long-hidden sexual trauma seems to be near the heart of Veronica's narrative – and a slow deconstruction of memory and self – there is too much ambiguity of cause-and-effect to turn recollection into diagnosis.
