RaveThe Brooklyn RailA compact, sacred marvel of a book ... Rowe has a habit of dropping pronouns and articles, truncating sentences; it gives her writing a spare quality, something like grace ... Rowe’s writing, too, has a compressed, consecrated, chronostratigraphic sound ... There is a sense of holy mystery to the story.
MixedBrooklyn RailThe novel is atmospherically anxious, evoking the \'uneasy tension\' of a world on the edge of disaster ... The fires provide both a backdrop and a running metaphor. Saldaña París is interested in inflammation and contagion ... At times, it seems that Saldaña París doesn’t trust the world he’s created to hold. He is occasionally uneasy with his choice of first-person narration, sometimes justifying it with flimsy gestures towards diary. He also has a tendency to repeat detail ... This is a book about growing hysteria and the flickering fickleness of shared realities—in this pervasive instability, it is perhaps understandable that the creeping distrust that is the subject of the book seems to have infected the author as well.
PositiveThe Brooklyn RailIn her stories, fiction and reality have a tendency to give way to one another.
PositiveThe Brooklyn RailThis book, then, is an exploration of what it might mean to think about breathing psychoanalytically, proceeding more impressionistically than argumentatively, more poetically than narratively ... Her tone is calm, even as she describes crises.
Michael Deagler
PositiveThe Brooklyn RailThis idea—sobriety as an arrested plot, the recovering alcoholic’s journey as “a knee-capped bildungsroman”—poses a narrative challenge, one Deagler solves by proposing the couch surfing novel as a version of the road novel.
Megan Nolan
RaveBrooklyn RailA commentary on form—a tabloid story told as a novel stretches and deepens, grows sadder and stranger and less sensational. It is, in this way, a novel in defense of the novel. The difference between tragedies scandalous and standard is more in circumstance and structure than in kind ... The novel is deeply concerned with the relationship between inner privacy and outward appearance, with what it means to be good or bad, and what, in the equation, is the balance between one’s private estimation and the judgment of others.
Kate Zambreno
PositiveBrooklyn RailZambreno offers a catalogue of these kernels, these moments of beauty and flashes of joy. There are things here, she suggests, worth grieving. There are things here worth saving.
