RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksIn parallel modes, each marks her way on paper, writing herself into an identity different from that she was born to. Gripping, baggy, recognizably feminist in its second wave, the novel tracks the relationships between men and women, and the conflict between working and motherhood, between workers and bosses, and always between Elena and Lila … This volume in particular is engrossing both in its richly detailed story and also in its greater concern with larger narrative issues. For one, it dramatizes that characters/identities are never essential or autonomous, but always created out of relationships with others (mothers, lovers, friends, enemies) and that they cohere, fragment, contradict one another, and change according to circumstances.
