Surreal...a tender and hilarious coming-of-age story of two sisters ... A magical, dreamlike presence in a hallucinatory narrative that is also surprisingly easy to follow.
So visceral and exacting in its prose that I often found myself wanting to put a foot over its drain to avoid further confrontation of a story that felt so true it was painful to be a part of. But the narrator is too sharp and sentimental to leave clogged for too long ... A sort of slowing of a swinging pendulum: there is relief when it comes to a halt, and the lingering satisfaction we got from watching the violent swings.
Madievsky’s prose is clear and insightful ... Her fragmented self illuminates issues of mental health stigma and intergenerational and sexual trauma. With intuitive prose, Madievsky transforms the narrator’s struggle into a narrative strength.
Searing ... What sets Madievsky’s novel apart from most other addiction narratives is how it’s situated at the intersection of addiction and gender ... On the level of prose, Madievsky wields imagery like an emotional sledgehammer. With her background in poetry...she offhandedly peppers her prose with brutal, brilliant figurative language ... Madievsky’s metaphors blur the edges of the world, altering one’s perception long after reading them ... Sober-me finds new meaning in the addiction fiction that addict-me once admired.
A kind of California neo-neo-noir, rebooting the genre’s saturated nightmares for the 21st century ... Madievsky’s narrator unfortunately spends more time poeticizing than proving Debbie’s charm ... For this reason, the grit in this novel sometimes feels unearned ... It feels as if Madievsky hurtles past...figures in a determination to reach the climactic peaks of her novel.
All-Night Pharmacy’s world feels like a Phoebe Bridgers song—spooky and sexy, stringing pop culture together with the abject, and always swelling with feeling ... Under the surface of these characters’ addictions and obsessions, All-Night Pharmacy throbs with generational grief ... Madievsky uses dry humor, finely dialed insights, and lush, imagistic language to articulate the burdens of the past that we carry in our bodies.
Tackling topics as wide-ranging as grooming, addiction to drugs and people, sexuality, and Shoah grief, Madievsky weaves a compelling coming-of-age yarn.
An exploded view of a conflicted young woman’s brain that delivers page after page of witty, often heartbreaking narration ... Madievsky displays tremendous storytelling range, capturing all that is bitter and hilarious, heartbreaking and enlightening, wise and foolish within the well-developed mind of a single central character.
Electric ... Madievsky renders her protagonist’s search for selfhood vividly and viscerally, resulting in a coming-of-age story that radiates like a Lynchian fever dream.
