MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewFascinating ... Farley makes rich use of clinical records and the material gathered by N.I.M.H. researchers dispatched to interview neighbors, teachers, classmates and relatives of the quadruplets ... The violence and dysfunction Farley describes is gothically sordid, painful to read about and entirely believable ... More concerned with the mythic and metaphorical than the medical ... The challenge for the reader, and for psychiatry, is that emblematic importance, much like untreated mental illness, can be more mask than illumination.
