RaveSlateAs in life, her baby is always present and always needy. While babies can be boring, the book never is. I found it thrilling, actually, to increasingly feel the burden of Honey. I began to dread her cries ... But even as I delighted at the way Kiesling built suspense out of early motherhood, I became angry that I hadn’t encountered this in literature before ... What Kiesling syntactically accomplishes is an exquisite look at the gulf between the narrow repetitive toil of motherhood and the sprawling intelligence of the mother that makes baby care so maddening ... By telling the story of a new mother, someone who might surmount the odds and take a nap but will never achieve a year of rest and relaxation, The Golden State reveals the limitations of the dream of an end to responsibilities. We may all be Bartlebys, preferring not to, but we’re stuck here, caught in the sluggish machinery of late capitalism and its \'godawful bureaucratic clusterfuck.\'
