This debut novel feels different. Madeleine Dunnigan immediately takes us inside the head of her rather scary protagonist, and makes his adventures in teenage lust and self-awareness as involving as they are immediate. The writing is constantly surprising, as unafraid of sensuality as it is of the story’s repeated eruptions of brutality ... Dunnigan makes her story rich with larger implications, both personal and political ... Her sentences are wonderfully alive to physical fact ... This is an impressive and accomplished debut. Jean’s and his story will speak to any reader who is battling to understand themselves as the owner of a queer body in a treacherous world. It will also speak to anyone who can remember how glorious – and dangerous – it once felt to find yourself in possession of a fully functioning heart.
Refreshing ... It takes nerve for a female debut novelist to centre a gay love story on teenage boys. When Jean and Tom share a solitary camping trip there are faint echoes of Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain. Dunnigan’s supple prose achieves its distinctive rhythm — much like Sally Rooney or Cormac McCarthy — through the absence of quotation marks, creating a seamless flow between narration, dialogue and internal thought ... Dunnigan occasionally risks opacity — her cool restraint can leave emotional developments slightly muted — and the final movement asks the reader to process a great deal of revelation at once, but she captures with painful clarity the intensity of youthful betrayal and longing ... A bruising portrait of adolescence in which love, violence, deception and self-discovery are inseparable.
A stellar debut ... Dunnigan’s storytelling is immersive from the very first pages ... Tackles both emotional and sexual scenes with immediacy, nuance and grace, fully conveying the immense uncertainty, excitement, longing and discovery of teens exploring their sexual identities. Her finely layered prose seamlessly weaves Jean’s past, present and future into the narrative ... A gorgeous novel about a teenager navigating his way toward an uncertain future amid soul-gutting longing, vulnerability and betrayals ... Will leave a resounding ache in readers’ hearts.
Dunnigan’s prose is carefully simple, and while some passages shimmer with piercing insight, the story can feel constrained by its own dedication to subtlety. The commitment to this austere mode makes the odd moments of clunky disclosure all the more jarring: metaphors made literal, realizations spelled out, pinches of traumatic memory reemerging just in time to contextualize destructive behavior. Even so, Jean is a compelling protagonist, his split-knuckled pursuit of a place in the world convincing in its sheer rawness.
Bruising, interesting, occasionally sublime.
