PanTimes Literary Supplement\"There is a lovely, lively memoir here, but it has been left trapped inside a confused – and apparently unedited – draft of a book. Hughes is capable of some wonderful reminiscences...But to get to such moments the reader must slog through pages of aimless asides ... Many of the book’s failings are the result of a dereliction of duty by the publisher. On almost every page editorial opportunities are missed. The past tense weighs down Hughes’s colloquial tone; the book is crying out for an alert present-tense narrator. Tautologies and garbled metaphors detract from otherwise lucid reflections and lost, wandering sentences derail whole paragraphs ... Such oversights are understandable in an unpublished diary, but woeful in a hardback marketed as a coherent \'memoir of love, obsession and feathers.\' Its author – who writes movingly on a number of occasions about her dyslexia – deserved better.\
