MixedThe Irish TimesA big, dense, frustrating novel stuffed full of brilliant writing and excessive minutiae in almost equal measure, Garth Risk Hallberg’s follow-up to 2015′s City on Fire is a book at odds with itself. It races down avenues of sparkling prose hot on the heels of wickedly self-destructive and erratically self-aware protagonists. It is solidly structured and plays effective games with visual interventions (such as chat message bubbles, photographs and fonts) ... It should purr, but instead, it stalls out every few pages to peer forensically at each lane closure sign, each playlist, each bustling street corner that it comes across. It is pitched as a road-trip into Great American Novel territory, but one cannot help but feel that Hallberg has missed a turn-off somewhere ... He treats us to one absolute cracker of an observation after another...yet these are weighed down by reams of extraneous detail that dullen what genuine literary fireworks are to be enjoyed here ... This editorial gulf between the reader and the author’s obvious talent results in a novel that creaks under its own weight. At half the size this could have been twice as powerful.
Miriam Toews
RaveThe Irish ExaminerIt may seem like a heavyweight read — and, to be fair, it often is — yet Toews leavens the persistent gloom which is characteristic of lesser literary writing with a vein of dark comedy ... It is an unexpected tone for a novel not just about depression and the moral quagmire of assisted dying, but for one based on the author’s own experience of her sister’s suicide in 2010 ... The novel is as much a work of truth as it is of imagination ... All My Puny Sorrows is thus a tonal masterclass of a novel, a sad, sad book which is compulsive reading because of how it acknowledges humour as a pivot-point in the seesaw of dignity. It is vulnerable to accusations of plotlessness, yes, but to criticise Toews for that is to miss the point entirely. Because this is not a story built around twists and turns. It is instead an engrossing and hugely satisfying dramatisation of an unimaginable request.
