PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewIt couldn’t be farther from the exploitative pocket paperback you’re probably picturing ... Lines that in a lesser book might simply act as mood setting or descriptive filler regularly surprise ... Curiously, it’s when the guns finally start blazing that the narrative spins its wheels a bit ... Once again, what comes to Johnston’s rescue is his ability to ground even the most flashy stylistic flourishes in convincing, unexpected detail.
Jonathan Dee
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewDee is a risk taker...and his restless, adventurous, at times reckless approach is nowhere more evident than in his latest roll of the dice: the taut, bare-bones, not entirely user-friendly Sugar Street ... Bleak as all this may sound, it’s in the methodical unpacking of how a human being might effectively cease to exist without actually committing suicide that Sugar Street is at its most enthralling ... The tension of Dee’s novel, especially in the closing pages, arises less from concern for X’s fate (we’ve been fairly confident, pretty much from the jump, that things won’t turn out well) than the narrative’s increasingly divided loyalties between down-and-dirty realism and the stylized, moody, hard-boiled punch of noir. Naturalism triumphs in the end — appropriately so, I’d say — but at a price. Clothing a story in the elegant trappings of crime fiction, a genre as dogmatic as it is beloved, only to dispense with the expected genre payoff is risky, to put it mildly.
