A smart, elegant and moving novel ... Hedman’s characters keep us at a tantalising arm’s length most of the time, and that makes moments of raw emotion all the more powerful.
One of the novel's pleasures is the way Hedman compresses challenging themes into her work ... The novel takes its time, but Hedman nicely dramatizes the dynamics among her characters ... An appealing story of a romantic triangle from a gifted author.
The novel has a fractured, unwieldy structure that echoes the relationships it describes: tortuously unbalanced, full of collisions and silences ... The novel’s nostalgic tone leaves it vulnerable to indulgence, and the time-jump framing device... is undeveloped to the point of near-redundancy ... Along with the vast passages of purple prose... the academic register of Hedman’s student characters begins to grate.
The language is often pleasantly surprising ... But as Hugo and Thora continue to falter on the question of who they are... the tension behind their listlessness falters. Hedman's descriptions delight, but interest wanes as her characters perform the same poses again and again.
