Brilliant ... So relentlessly quotable ... As happens with stunning regularity in this book, Molnar’s sentence gives up riches and terrors. She is describing a transformation that is total, painful and deeply baffling ... Molnar pushes this transformation into the stuff of quiet horror. In doing so, she’s written an essential and surprisingly thrilling book about motherhood ... A sense of looming violence stains the entire book ... An honest rendering.
Bring[s] us down from the clouds into the muck and mire of postpartum reality ... The shifts in the narrator’s state of mind are adroitly handled, suggesting the fluid tangle of the real and the imaginary that she is experiencing. Many of her thoughts are deeply disturbing, leaving the reader unclear as to how seriously we are to take them—or, alternately, how seriously the narrator herself takes them ... The Nursery is a powerful brew of a novel, emitting unpleasant sights, smells, and emotions that are rarely captured in print; it is frequently disquieting in its brutal, insistent candor ... Although it cuts back and forth, sometimes a bit confusingly, between the narrator’s life pre-pregnancy, the days she spends in the hospital after delivering the baby, and the harrowing aftermath, the cumulative effect gives the novel a largeness of scope that it otherwise might not have had and saves it from potential claustrophobia. The prose occasionally falters, and a phrase will sound as if it were a mistranslation (the writer was born in Budapest and raised in Sweden, though she is writing here in English), but it is in the main charged with an immediacy and directness that pull the reader in.
Less about motherhood than it is about the loneliness motherhood induces ... Like Miffo’s anguish, the shape of the novel itself is a spiral, a continuous inner monologue of a perpetual today ... The Nursery dares to question the inviolable dictates of a mother’s love when a human is reduced to her suffering—perhaps no love is unconditional after all.
Grisly, extreme ... To properly appreciate its accomplishment, we must peel back the familiar connotations of the words nursery, postpartum, lactation, and even motherhood ... Though the book avoids the culture wars, the protagonist’s experience suggests difficult truths about what this profoundly physical and female-bodied experience can be like for women with today’s expectations ... Deserves to be widely read ... Has the depth and illuminating qualities of serious literature
An engaging experiment in uncomfortable empathy that finds its tonal antecedents in cerebral body horror movies ... Molnar describes her character’s recovery with a detached, almost philosophical fatalism ... The inaugural example of a page-turner about postpartum depression, might also be the last word on the subject.
A nerve and reality shredding nightmare ... It is as perceptive on the catastrophic loss of selfhood having a baby can bring as it is on the resentment and fury a mother can feel at a newborn’s relentless hunger ... Molnar’s more unsettling trick is to present her narrator’s more murderous thoughts from a perspective of absolute sanity. And yet this is also an oddly affirmative novel, alive with a dangerous self-aware humour.
Molnar offers a harrowing cautionary tale about postpartum depression and the terror it can cause as it strips away any sense of control over mind and body. Some descriptions are so raw and graphic that one almost wants to read them with eyes half-closed. An important, unromanticized look at the instant, drastic changes new motherhood can bring, though a caveat: it does not address the relief that early medical intervention can provide.
The mood in this debut novel is claustrophobic ... Molnar grittily conjures the exhaustion and disorientation of the first weeks with a first child ... Miffo seems never to experience the moments of joy that, for most new parents, at least occasionally alleviate the equally powerful exhaustion, anger, and sorrow. She strikes one dreary note throughout, and by the time she finally emerges from her depression and steps outdoors, readers may well be very tired of her. Commendably honest but not compelling fiction.
Entrancing ... Though it’s unclear how some of the pieces are meant to fit, such as the visits from the neighbor, Molnar brings a cutting verisimilitude to her portrayal of the narrator’s fuzzy state of mind, and she’s equally unsparing with her vivid descriptions of childbirth, recovery, and the physical demands of early motherhood. It amounts to a powerful look at what a new mother endures.
