MixedThe Times (UK)Forgiving the heavy-handedness of the parallels...there’s plenty of intrigue at the start of Jess Kidd’s novel ... Yet it struggles to get beyond a low simmer ... Part of the reason the narrative feels lukewarm is to do with the novel’s form. We rarely make it through half a page before getting to a break in the text. Initially, this is pleasing ... Yet stretched over nearly 400 pages, this is testing ... Questions we might expect — about the effects of power, about the thinness of the line between order and anarchy — largely don’t come up and you’re left wishing the pot had got a little hotter.
