PositiveThe Globe and Mail (CAN)It was an enjoyable first read (and, at 182 pages, you can finish it in an afternoon) but why, I wondered, all this attention to Henry? By my count, only one-third of the narrative follows Kristin, even though it’s she who brings the novel to its concluding confrontation. Then after a week, I returned to the beginning and found there what I hadn’t noticed the first time: how the writing’s straightforwardness is in fact a sleight of hand. The warning signs of Kristin’s obsessive fandom, seemingly harmless, were there from the start. So, too, were the hints that Henry doesn’t know how to interact with people when not reading lines ... What makes this pair so interesting isn’t the asymmetry of their relationship, but that deep down, they’re so similar...in their common neuroses ... Some writers might take a story such as this and feel the impulse to paint Kristin as the crazy, possibly misunderstood, one. Foulds, doesn’t do that, though ... Dream Sequence reminds readers to be present and to value what you have now.
Claudia Dey
PositiveThe Globe and Mail\"Part of the pleasure of this novel is piecing together the culture that grew in this petri dish of isolation, as told by people who have known only this ... Absent an obvious guru or fanatical fervour, Heartbreaker doesn’t read quite the same as recent cult fiction. Instead, it brings to mind Sun Belt’s 2015 experimental fiction Cabalcor: An Extracted History, which tells the story of a fictional tar sands company town, its unique culture and demise ... What emerges from beneath the details of territory life is a completely unsaccharine novel about motherhood as a force, the way a storm is a force.\
Margaret Bradham Thornton
MixedThe Globe and MailA Theory of Love is about the dissolution of a marriage caused not by spite but by negligence ... And there lies the biggest problem with this story. Notice I said this is a novel about the dissolution of a marriage, not the dissolution of love. Despite the novel’s title and Helen’s continued insistence, I’m unconvinced Helen and Christopher ever have much of a connection.
