... Eerie and unsettling ... The novel emphasizes atmosphere and incidents over plot, implying that the pleasures of narrative resolution are out of reach. Occasional flashbacks fill in the family’s history, but offer no explanation of their predicament ... Written in startling, imaginative vignettes, At the Edge of the Woods is an evocative, terrifying story about a family’s efforts to survive a crisis.
... too mysterious to be fully pinned down ... The novel takes on an episodic feel, created by various characters who wander in and out of the narrative ... The novel also has an odd sense of humor, often presenting an acerbic angle on everyday life ... The book's most lasting impression might be the anxious mood that pervades the novel, the sense of the world--including other people--as irrational, unknowable and threatening. Some readers might think At the Edge of the Woods has perfectly captured the mood of the times.
... haunting, memorable ... Eschewing chronology and plot, Ono’s immersive narrative accrues insights about the nature of violence and mercy. It’s an accomplished work by a masterful writer.
... translator Juliet Winters Carpenter captures Ono’s narrator’s deep, existential terror ... No single disaster drives these refugees. Violence. Climate change. Other people’s greed. At the Edge of the Woods puts these realities of the contemporary world on full display and presents them as what they are—horrors. It reads like a horror novel or a supernatural thriller because it plunges the reader into her own helplessness in the face of the mass suffering of other people.
Ono’s prose, elegantly translated by Carpenter, is deceptively simple. His references range from Darwin to Mozart. But while the marketing copy helpfully explains that this is a novel about 'climate catastrophe,' it’s difficult to know what, in the end, to make of it. The narrator’s son brings home an old woman who quickly disappears. The forest is rumored to be full of imps who steal children—and also mail. The mailman seems to have fangs. How all these details connect to one another—and whether they do—is anyone’s guess ... Beautifully written but puzzling to the point of opacity.
