The great pleasure of this novel, aside from its depiction of Sophie coming into her own, is its celebration of reading and writers.Jane Austen, the Brontës, Katherine Mansfield, Daphne du Maurier, Hilary Mantel, Penelope Lively and Elizabeth Strout all get a mention.
Mason’s prose is wan and witty, handling the admixture of pathos and bathos well; and her sinuous sentences capture the wavering movements of thought with less fuss and more laughs than, say, Virginia Woolf ... Mason is brilliant, too, at describing the small but intense joys of everyday life ... If there’s a fault to be identified in this continuously witty and touching narrative, it’s in the person of Lilac .... She’s more deus ex machina in Sophie’s story than fully realised character ... But perhaps that’s by design. In this Bridget-Jones-meets-Pirandello caper, Mason is nothing if not knowing.
The narrative runs almost entirely on the fumes of over-weighted trivialities ... Sophie is a wet cardigan of a protagonist ... A novel of unprecedented banality.
A tragicomic tour de force. The novel offers a defining portrait of loneliness, and its secret bedfellow – shame – in the digital age ... Mason is excellent at illuminating the dark comedy inherent to life ... A beguiling novel that shape-shifts to become something so much more than a sum of its meta-narrative parts.
Mason paints a vivid world, from Sophie’s glum flat to the cast of characters at the festival. Sophie, Standing There is a tribute to literature, relationships and the power of owning one’s experiences.
Smart and heartwarming ... Mason winks at the reader in clever metafictional asides ('If someone wrote a novel about Sophie, which they wouldn’t, but if they did'), and the plot reaches a satisfying conclusion. It’s a moving tale of a book lover’s search for her own happy ending.
This won’t be New Zealander Mason’s best book, but that’s okay—she’ll write others to contend for that title ... Not for everyone, but perfect for Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan fans who revel in moments of sorrow and bliss.
