PositiveThe Arts DeskA re-imagining of her Irish mother’s pregnancy and its repercussions, some of its most vivid parts concern her father ... The book’s title, one of Felix’s endearments eagerly seized upon by Rosaleen, is wonderfully ambiguous ... The stark choices that all these women have to make are brought to life with Freud’s customary skill, but occasionally you wonder if she’s constrained by the thoroughly researched, one-track nature of the story – and sometimes the time-line is not entirely clear. Still, there are wonderful observations.
Emma Cline
PositiveThe Arts DeskDaddy’s style is tighter and bleaker than The Girls . The stories are full of disappointing – and disappointed - middle-aged men, their edges blunted by pharmaceuticals, legal and illegal ... Cline is adept at the telling detail – a teenage’s girl’s \'thickish, animal hair\' - that brings a character, however minor, into focus ... Sometimes these stories can seem a little repetitive – another broken, twisted, over-privileged, mainly Californian family (though Mack the Knife skewers a very New York milieu), another compromised man on pills – and there are occasional scenes and characters that seem inconsequential. And compelling as most of them are, none quite achieve the pitch-perfect wonder of White Noise, published in the New Yorker in June and not included in this collection, which enters the mind of Harvey Weinstein the day before his conviction.
