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.
