MixedThe New York Time Book ReviewAs you might guess from its title (borrowed aslant from a Stein Mehren poem), Hveberg’s novel is filled with a self-serious sentimentality. Rakel’s intellectual prowess and twee sensibilities are carefully demonstrated and amplified throughout the book’s many sections ... Hveberg, a former research mathematician at the University of Oslo, structures her novel in the model of a Sierpinski gasket — in fractal geometry, a triangular figure that \'contains smaller copies of itself on many different levels and is full of holes of various sizes.\' It’s a structure used to greater effect in Infinite Jest, better suited to that book’s maximalist style and convoluted plotlines. In contrast, Hveberg’s material proves too thin and insular for such a recursive format, making the end result appear repetitive despite McCullough’s nimble translation.
Kyle Lucia Wu
PositiveThe New York TimesThe novel features achingly copious descriptions of food, and bruising scenes of meals Willa shares but seldom enjoys with those she wishes to be closer to: her parents, Bijou, Bijou’s mother. Occasionally the narrator’s circling obsession with food weighs down the narrative, but the overall effect conveys how fraught basic functioning can be for Willa, who feels she fits in nowhere ... Wu’s finely crafted sentences and crisp imagery render visceral Willa’s inner disquiet as she simmers in that ambiguity.
Shruti Swamy
RaveThe New York TimesSentences undulate until they are brought up short by staccato bursts ... Swamy plays with vibrant textual movement as Vidya awakens to her own art, and follows the coming-of-age touchstones of college, first love and then marriage, with its villainous in-laws. Her prose is so assured that even when long sentences are jostled by abrupt transitions, the effect appears dramatic and deliberate, like a dancer staring directly at the audience for an infinitesimal pause ... The novel also moves deftly among narrative perspectives.
