PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewAs she reports, Fairbanks falls in love with South Africa in all its beauty and complexity. Her curiosity seems boundless — a boundlessness that, translated into writing, can at times be distracting. As Fairbanks follows her main characters, she gets swept up in the rich tapestry of the country and includes an abundance of personal memories, fables, speculation and musings. She seems to have spoken to or listened in on the conversations of nearly every one of the hundreds of people whose paths she crossed during the years she spent working on this book ... Fairbanks’s empathetic, comprehensive reporting shines when she dispenses with tangents and tells it straight, providing insight into how ordinary people build lives in the aftermath of political upheaval.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewPerhaps Marzano-Lesnevich’s battle to claim her own story has led her to claim the stories of others too. In the book’s memoir sections, she writes candidly of her father’s rages, the hidden death of an infant sister, her eating disorder. But in the sections about Langley, she inserts inventive flourishes and fabricated details atop real-life events. Though she has engaged in extensive research to reconstruct the case — Langley’s tragic conception, his twisted development, his hideous crimes — she does not seem to have interviewed the living characters for her book. Instead, she explains, she pored over documentation and then 'layered my imagination onto the bare-bones record of the past to bring it to life.' The result can seem contrived ... Marzano-Lesnevich is at her most powerful when she recounts personal memories.
Sheila Kohler
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewThe most poignant passages take place during childhood. The girls’ father, a ghost even before his untimely death, worked endlessly to satisfy their mother’s taste for luxury, which included an 18-month world tour, adults only. This abandonment did not apparently pain the sisters, accustomed to nannies. Their purest bond was to each other anyway ... It can be frustrating to read of South African lives so cut off from the reality of their country, but then again, Sheila remembers that race-based legislation was treated as a distasteful enigma during their youth ... In the end, this is a memoir of love, sorrow, sisterhood and privilege. It’s also a memoir of the limitations of such privilege — in particular, the inescapable tragedy of being born female in a patriarchal world, where all the money, beauty and breeding cannot protect you from a man who takes what he wants without consequence.
