[An Ocean of Minutes] draws on the best of old and new CanLit traditions ... The clear-eyed, evocative writing here is reminiscent of Margaret Atwood, and anyone familiar with The Handmaid’s Tale will find resonance in these pages ... Lim may be writing in the CanLit tradition, but her voice is all her own ... [She] comes into her own here, with prose that’s elegant and haunting, somehow managing to be both unsentimental and deeply moving at the same time. A devastating debut.
An Ocean of Minutes has a premise to thrill ... While Polly is not the most compelling woman to grace the pages of literature, the reader still shares in her heartbreak ... One of Lim’s greatest successes in her debut novel...is creating a future that is so completely imbued with bureaucratic nonsense that it as maddening as it is believable.
At first blush, the premise of Lim’s dystopian novel is a familiar one: a deadly flu pandemic sweeps across the world in the early 1980s. But the solution is inventive ... An intriguing and unique entry in the crowded dystopian landscape.
It’s a complicated plot, but Lim’s steady prose and deft character development ensured that I was hooked ... Lim paints a strange and unfamiliar world with her novel, full of fascinating social commentary on class differences, racism and sexism ... It’s easy to fall into this novel and become emotionally involved.
...[a] stellar follow-up to 2007's The Same Woman ... Lim’s enthralling novel succeeds on every level: as a love story, an imaginative thriller, and a dystopian narrative.
Told from Polly’s point of view, the novel oscillates between the present and future—a jarring juxtaposition that’s equally touching and heartbreaking ... Lim’s writing shines brightest when she’s ruminating on time, memory, and love ... A beautiful debut exploring how time, love, and sacrifice are never what they seem to be.
