There’s a fanciful flavour to the mixed bag of stories that follow ... This is a collection of scraps and strands, loosely bound together, as though Atkinson is only tinkering with the worlds she creates and curtails.
Atkinson play[s] fast and loose with reality ... Such exploits can struggle for much resonance, and the results are patchy; perhaps paradoxically, it is when they ally with another of Atkinson’s gifts – conjuring specific social textures from a handful of well-chosen observations ... Shile the culmination of her story is evidently fantastical, the reality that preceded it is all too believable.
The 11 short stories in this collection each weave together, playful in their intertextuality as they nod to other stories in the collection and beyond ... have rarely ever picked up a book again for a second go. But when I read the last page of Normal Rules Don’t Apply I had an intense desire to flick back to the beginning and start again.
Pushes metafictional playfulness to the fore, perhaps because the short-story format frees Atkinson – who also publishes detective fiction – from the demands of complex plotting. Nevertheless, the eleven entries here are loosely interlinked, with characters and incidents re-emerging without warning, often to comic effect ... These philosophical underpinnings don’t weigh down Atkinson’s idiosyncratic voice or the breezy humour with which she explores the relationship between words and the world, reality and fiction, art and life ... If you’re thinking about what fiction means, no invocation could be more thought-provoking or ironically complex.
Stunning...a master class ... If the concept sounds promisingly fun, the whimsical but sharp prose is built to match, full of speculative glee, but tinged with poignancy.
This collection feels like an amateurish parody of her signature style, exacerbated by the attempt to tie it all together with recurring characters and repeating motifs ... Atkinson’s fans might want to wait for her next book.
