MixedThe Washington PostYee’s buzzy debut is startlingly fleet ... The narrative is made up of loosely structured prose fragments — rarely longer than a page or two — in the vein of Renata Adler and Jenny Offill ... Comic ... Yee’s prose has a meandering, conversational rhythm, and reading Maggie feels pleasurably like clicking through the back archives of a webcomic or lingering over lunch wine with an old friend ... It’s risky to design a novel featuring all these gaps, like air pockets keeping it afloat ... Gives a sense of talent kept in reserve for some other, later occasion — of an author wary of spending it all in one place. I hope Yee opens the vault. The clouds look heavy these days.
Heather Havrilesky
MixedThe Washington PostYou’d be justified in taking Foreverland as an unwitting indictment of hetero marriage, the nuclear family, the whole catastrophe. Havrilesky, the longtime author of the advice column \'Ask Polly,\' makes the milestones of white-picket-fence life sound miserable ... But for every complaint...there are some exquisitely simple moments of recognition ... She won’t settle for one descriptor when she can have six. The prose tumbles out in helpless run-ons, earnest asyndeton ... Recounting their lives together, she overextends her metaphors so far it’s like she’s hoping to hear the joints pop ... Havrilesky won’t win over everyone with her high-saturation comic style. But to readers receptive to that kind of swashbuckling bluster...the sheer effort of her prose is a kind of valentine.
