RaveThe Times (UK)Part bruisingly tender love story, part nerve-clanging submarine thriller ... Armfield drips the supernatural into the quotidian ... The weirdness is kept in check by the humane warmth of Leah and Miri’s relationship ... There is such tenderness in the precision of these observations of long-term love and such eerie estrangement when the uncanny intrudes. Eventually, the two moods fuse at the novel’s heart-slicing, cinematic climax. I’ll be thinking about it for ages — and checking the bathtub for grit.
Sally Rooney
MixedThe Telegraph (UK)I’m sorry to tell you that Sally Rooney has been listening to her critics ... Theoretically, it is a plausible and interesting stylistic development for someone who writes in the classic English novel tradition—a contemporary twist on epistolary. But in reality, the emails are like a spine: structurally integral but knobbly and rigid ... It isn’t that they are uninteresting—very few things that Rooney thinks or writes are. The problem is that they bear only tenuous relation to the business of the novel. They do nothing to advance the plot and weirdly little to flesh out the characters from whose keyboards they purport to spring ... Jammed between the emails is some of Rooney’s most beautiful writing. She made her name with two books that treat the mechanics of first love with sincerity and painstaking, sometimes painful, attention to detail; with her third, she has brought that sensibility to bear on a long love, stretching unspoken down many years, with even richer results ... It is a puzzle of a novel: brilliant and flawed.
Sally Rooney
MixedViva (NZ)... email exchanges between Alice and Eileen...[are] a plausible and interesting stylistic development for someone who writes in the classic English novel tradition—a contemporary twist on epistolary. But in reality, the emails are like a spine: structurally integral but knobbly and rigid. Their content slips between politics and dense reams of fact, so that they end up reading more like Wikipedia entries than fiction ... It isn’t that they are uninteresting—very few things that Rooney thinks or writes are. The problem is that they bear only tenuous relation to the business of the novel. They do nothing to advance the plot and weirdly little to flesh out the characters from whose keyboards they purport to spring. It is also primarily in the emails that the other real irritation of the novel emerges ... It’s all the more frustrating because jammed between the emails is some of Rooney’s most beautiful writing ... Rooney has also mastered the art of writing about sex. There’s a lot of it, including an entire chapter on the phone, which unfolds like a miniature play, and it is brilliantly done: gripping, steamy, unbearably sad ... it is a puzzle of a novel: brilliant and flawed ... If only someone with courage and a red pen had taken this book to task, it might have been her masterpiece.
