RaveFull Stop... while we’ve stuck with Gina’s point of view this whole time, ultimately it’s not her choices but the deaconess Susanna’s that matter. It’s actually the adults in the story who can influence the outcome. They’ve been there all along as background or props and come to the fore in the last pages. Szabo manages this astonishing transition, where the story she’s wrapped us up in whisks away, and we have to rethink all we’ve been told. What a pleasure it is then, on finishing the book, to turn back to the first page and read again that Gina felt \'as if a bomb had destroyed her home.\' What had been adolescent hyperbole is now a real bomb, promising real destruction and death ... Szabo is a fleet, modern writer ... Abigail is a moral—though not moralizing—book.
Jessie Greengrass
RaveBOMBIn a culture that downplays and refuses to listen to women’s pain, Sight (Hogarth) finds a way to extract our attention ... Though in many senses Greengrass’s novel joins a host of recent books on motherhood...its scope moves beyond what it means to have a child to what it means to be a female person observed, studied, probed. That such probing turns female bodies into inert curiosities makes the live, lithe complaints of Greengrass’s narrator into a kind of resistance ... Greengrass makes us see this through the eyes of a woman who is deliberate as she can be about whether to conceive ... Greengrass’s sentences parade arresting interpolations amid ornate descriptions, the oddly inserted hesitancies and pauses giving each phrase a kind of metallic gleam as of interlocked tubes ... Despite the narrator’s crushed thoughtfulness, the redemption is all in the remarkable beauty and gravity of the prose. This is a quiet and authentic resistance.
