RaveThe Times (UK)It always feels risky to move from young adult to adult fiction ... But Albert manages the transition smoothly. The novel is sophisticated in its exploration of the complex relationship dynamics at play ... The novel takes a touch too long to reach its resolution, and its ending feels somewhat out of step with the Guin we’ve come to know. But the sheer pleasure of its reading overrides these niggles, and contemporary fantasy could certainly do with more sophisticated, updated takes on the genre like this one.
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)The reader is never given a direct account of the scene; like everything in the book, it comes to us second hand through Agathe’s crisp edicts on her generation ... In the end there is very little conclusion to the thorny problems of the novel, as it drifts into an unlikely romance. Even a ponderous read like this is enjoyable when it’s written by someone as sharply intelligent as Williams — but I wish she had retained some of the fearlessness we saw in The Doloriad.
PositiveThe Times (UK)Kovatcheva excels at building atmosphere and depicting rising tensions, and that will be enough for many readers, but there is less satisfaction to be found in what the novel has to say about the world — either the one we find in the book or our own — than the best of the genre can offer.
