The story unspools with the clever structure following the Mikkola sisters through 35 years of their lives ... Told in vivid prose that explores the immigrant experience, family bonds, and a supposed curse passed from mother to daughter, Khemiri’s bold, intricate family
Writing in jaunty, run-on sentences often a page or more in length, Khemiri crafts a spectacularly meandering shaggy dog story, abandoning linear plot to focus on small incidents of daily life as Jonas and the sisters, whose lives only intersect occasionally, fall in and out of love and clatter through the world. Readers willing to go along for the lengthy ride should be delighted by Khemiri’s stubborn characters and bouncy prose.
Wondrous ... Blending humor and pathos, Khemiri perfectly encapsulates the push and pull of living in two different and sometimes dueling cultures. It’s a staggering achievement.
Long in the telling, but a lively portrait of familial, cultural, and amorous entanglements ... An expansive, complex tale ... It’s a daring concept, but Khemiri pulls it off capably, with that last minute containing an especially moving episode. The longer pieces have their longueurs, with Anastasia, drug-addled and lost, taking much of the story’s oxygen, but each part offers a tantalizing bit of a secret that the reader must pursue to the end in order to understand just how Jonas’ story intertwines with the Mikkolas’, even as their lives have over decades.
