PanThe Telegraph (UK)Many will buy The Guest, then, but I’m not sure many will finish it. It’s a 15-page character sketch stretched to novel length; soon, even Cline herself seems bored. The first few dozen pages are undeniably impressive, as bracing as saltwater ... Unfortunately, Cline’s gift for physical description cannot sustain 304 pages. As the opening – a delirious recollection of a bender – gives way to the main story, the dialogue becomes painful, the efforts at psychology heavy-handed ... Nothing of consequence ever follows from anything, scenes petering out more by exhaustion than design ... No character becomes surprising, or even convincing ... Cline seems torn between minimalism and the plot-driven, romance-plot demands of a bestseller, and not to have decided either way; the effect is less evocative than merely evasive.
Claire Dederer
PanThe New Statesman (UK)\"Dederer, however, does not achieve her goal. I’m not sure how she has spent the past five years, but it is hard to imagine she spent much of it researching this book. Dederer includes some interesting, though mostly well known, biography (did you know Richard Wagner was anti-Semitic?), and a little equally well-trodden interpretation (did you know that Humbert Humbert is an antihero?), but if you’re looking for a book that actually engages with the logic of \'cancellation,\' this isn’t it.\
John Boyne
PanNew StatesmanWith his latest treacly tome All the Broken Places – complete with title so maudlin it preempts all mockery – Boyne has gifted us with a Holocaust novel so self-indulgent, so grossly stereotyped, so shameless and insipid that one is almost astonished that he has dared ... As with the preceding novel, All the Broken Places has a heavy-handed, pedagogical plot ... The dialogue is leaden and expository ... This is not literature ... It is a consummate failure.