RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewDeliciously weird ... No straightforward crime-and-coming-of-age story. The novel bristles with dark magic ... The novel has its own peculiar fever-dream logic, especially in the last third, where things get really weird and murky. Plot threads are left frayed and dangling, many mysteries are never resolved, and there are no real answers, which may drive readers craving a more traditional narrative nuts ... The resulting weirdness does the opposite of weighing down the novel — it elevates it to something that is equal parts gruesome and gorgeous and otherworldly. Smothermoss is a compulsive journey.
Shubnum Khan
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMagical ... The scorned wife, feels cartoonishly villainous. And as we race toward parallel endings, one shocking, the other predictable (with its own kind of satisfaction), we lose sight of Sana herself. These are minor issues, however, in a novel that is an ambitious delight, with rich characters and some exceptionally lovely writing.
A. K. Blakemore
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBlakemore paints her subject with the same terrible compassion and searing fury at injustice that she brings to her poetry ... Every sentence is gorgeous. There’s a dark delight here ... Powerful and provocative.
Jenni Fagan
RaveThe New York Times Book Review... a cabinet of curiosities that is both a love letter to the Scottish capital, and a knife to its throat ... Fagan...has a ferocious empathy for her ootlins [outsider characters] and their struggles in a society that rejects and oppresses them ... Occasionally, her characters feel slightly too modern in their thinking, too prescient of the world to come ... like all the characters, Burroughs is so richly drawn, so enjoyable to be with, that you can forgive the authorial slips. Certainly, it’s not ahistorical to believe that society’s outcasts had a keen understanding of how they’ve had to make their own ways of being, find their own ways to be seen ... the author...shifts between these voices with fevered joy, taking us through a host of characters who are all extravagant, wild and wounded at heart ... Filled with blistering social critique, Luckenbooth is an ambitious and ravishing novel that will haunt me long after. Stories can be like a house, somewhere you can inhabit for a while. The best kind leave behind a room inside you.
