MixedSouthern Review of BooksAn exceptional display of style with muddled sense ... The opening whiffs of a political thriller soon disperse. Focusing on the family, the novel reveals itself to be an awkward marriage of two mid-twentieth-century genres: paranoid conspiracy and wealthy suburban malaise ... In their subtlety, the family dynamics offer clearer indictment of the callousness at the heart of a certain brand of conservatism than the overt political scenes. That may be why they take up most of the novel. Long stretches pass where one might forget a conspiracy plot is afoot ... Homes has often tried to shock before, and succeeded. But, a decade and a half after these historical events, our shock receptors are worn out. The Unfolding flops when trying to muster our last reserves ... Yet underneath this wobbly scaffolding is a finely wrought depiction of people attached to an ideology that hasn’t served them well.
