RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTaut and propulsive ... Everyone here is on the edge of some kind of cliff, and McLean unsentimentally renders their various precipices with incredible energy and humor ... Dark comedy ... Grotesque, morally unsettling and entertaining, all at once ... She holds each character up to the bright interrogatory light of her observations ... Her prose moves with muscle and rhythm, the dialogue swift and captivating. Story lines occasionally opt — some more successfully than others — for a dreamlike space that collapses time and expands metaphor. If at times the endings don’t quite develop the movement of certain stories as much as they could, then it’s the sentence-by-sentence motor that pushes us forward ... McLean keeps us guessing about whom to root for and when, swerving her stories and reshaping our sympathies in a paragraph.
Melissa Broder
PositiveThe Washington Post\"The Pisces is many things: a jaunt in a fabulous voice, a culture critique of Los Angeles, an explicit tour of all kinds of sex (both really good and really bad), but possibly most of all, it is a persuasive excavation into what might drive Lucy’s compulsion for a certain kind of connection ... Broder’s voice has a funny, frank Amy Schumer feel to it, injected with moments of a Lydia Davis-type of abstraction that can turn the existence of a woman walking by in skimpy silk shorts into a meditation on meaninglessness. These are often the strongest moves of the novel’s voice: from the minor keen observation into the resonant theoretical. At other times, though, we are so centered in Lucy’s head that the outside world drifts too far away ... By the end, the character and Broder acknowledge something else is going on. There is plenty of lively sex and humor here for readers to relish, but trade Eros for Thanatos for the book’s center — and depth.\
Helen Oyeyemi
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewFox and Foxe’s stories, written together, gain gravity and depth. Now the characters can connect, even if these connections are fraught and painful. Oyeyemi never lets go her ability to turn a phrase, but here she uses her powers for the gut-level work, the agony and beauty of passion and love. And the stories are wonderful … The book makes a case for itself and its unusual structure that is utterly convincing. Some readers may crave more overt connections between the stories. Yet they create a mosaic between Fox and Foxe, a cracked portrait of love, all the while working as a refracted mirror of the relationship between husband and wife, which has been strained by the dominance of Mr. Fox’s increasingly active fantasy world … Charm is a quality that overflows in this novel, and it works under its best definition: as a kind of magical attraction and delight.
Emma Donoghue
PositiveThe New York Times Sunday Book ReviewJack’s voice is one of the pure triumphs of the novel: in him, she has invented a child narrator who is one of the most engaging in years — his voice so pervasive I could hear him chatting away during the day when I wasn’t reading the book. Donoghue rearranges language to evoke the sweetness of a child’s learning without making him coy or overly darling; Jack is lovable simply because he is lovable … There’s a lot to manage — the external, vivid, social world is a huge and gratifying resource here, and Jack’s eyes remake the familiar. It is invigorating, watching him learn, and the way Donoghue reveals the consequences of Room through her attention to detail is tremendous.
