RaveThe MillionsWhat’s enchanting is the way that most everyone – no matter how fixed at the story’s outset – is moving towards the same sublime adolescent freedom as Madeleine. It’s our privilege as readers to not just witness this mass unfettering, but to share in it: we feel the new lightness in each character’s step ... As we follow the antic momentum towards the Cat’s Pajamas (and, we assume, the hour of 2 A.M.), the book shimmers with pratfalls and wit, feeling at once real-to-life and larger-than ... One question: is it possible for a group of characters to be too charismatic? If so, that was my only real objection to Bertino’s novel ... Bertino draws rich and real human beings with enviably few strokes of the pen. Instead of feeling overcrowded, the book feels lively, with the jostling energy of…well, a club.
Lauren Groff
PositiveBookslut\"It would do Groff a disservice to suggest that this book rests on having any particular \'point\'; the novel exists in its sentences, its breaths, its sliding between the human and the sublime...But nonetheless, the moment that most astonished me was reading about Mathilde for the first time from her own perspective, and realizing how eclipsed she\'d been by Lotto\'s enthusiasm, love, and -- let\'s just say it -- masculine self-regard. With Lotto guiding us, Mathilde is a beautiful woman, self-effacing and calm, if at times a bit chilly, and it\'s her disappointment that he fears most. She is his loving wife who works to support his failed acting career and buoys up his successful writing. He worries that she\'ll leave him, that his lost family money...will prove too great a burden. And then, only eventually, he fears she\'s deceived him by cheating. This in and of itself is a rich, if familiar, story. Then you turn the page.\
