PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewPedersen skillfully shifts between these tessellating pieces of family history and unfurls unsettling patterns ... Pedersen does well to temper the accumulative dread with the care and camaraderie of Sunshine’s nearby relatives ... Further generations are described compellingly, and Pedersen slots each into the novel’s familiar mold ... a wonderfully evoked place of rot and ruin ... The brackish setting allows for anger, fear, love and despair to all be felt as one. And the author delicately handles the messy union between human culpability and generational damage. That insatiable crocodile might be made of human cruelty, or abject loneliness, redundancies and foreclosures — or a muddy mess of it all.
