RaveTimes Literary Supplement (TLS)Ambitious in its emotional scope ... Jimmie’s co-workers show Volckmer at her most startling ... A bathroom rendezvous provides a diverting counterpoint to the book’s mostly ruminative narration ... Amusing ... Katharina Volckmer’s jokes are always consequential, and her novel ends up saying much that is profound about work and isolation and capitalist estrangement.
PositiveThe New StatesmanIt is easy to cringe, but it is this conviction that has made Gilbert into such a phenomenon. What makes her so hateable is also what makes her so effective: a total refusal of irony, an evangelical belief in the therapeutic value of disclosure ... Is Gilbert a narcissist? Of course she is. But so is every memoirist worth reading ... If there’s any terminal uniqueness here, it isn’t Gilbert’s, it’s her critics’, convinced their barbs are unprecedented, even as they repeat the same old charge against the one woman who’s already outlived it.
