PositiveThe Millions\"For some, Wang treads territory that will feel well worn ... But this collection... does more than educate the reader ... With a researcher’s sensibility, [Wang] recounts her experiences—as a student at Yale, as a lab manager in Stanford’s Mood and Anxiety Disorder Laboratory, as a fashion blogger, as a counselor at a camp for children with bipolar disorder, and twice as a patient in a psychiatric hospital. When Wang makes herself vulnerable and relates her experiences, the essays are utterly engaging ... In her life, Wang has obviously done more than survive from one second to the next. She’s written an important collection of essays of which all of us will be more knowledgeable and sympathetic for having read.\
Alice Hoffman
PanThe New York Times Sunday Book Review...a long novel full of middling descriptions, hackneyed characters and histrionic plot twists … Different characters supposedly narrate the novel’s various sections, yet all these voices consistently wallow in the same sort of hyperbole and forced metaphor … The abundance of overstatement and clumsy description minimizes the impact of actual dramatic events. When the women take lovers, steal babies, cast spells, their actions feel contrived. Although, toward the end of the novel, one of the characters explains the uniformity of expression by declaring that she is passing on the stories of those who did not survive, this seems equally unconvincing.
