Lacerating, exhilarating ... Both boisterous and bleak, life-enhancing and life-denying, familiar and yet wholly original. It feels essential. You will probably read nothing else like it this year ... Musing and retrospective, forcefully acerbic ... Brown’s language is poetic and rhythmic, physical and distinct ... It’s heavy reading, and yet in Brown’s hands the material somehow spins lighter.
Playing with language, dialect, perspective, and time, Brown casts an amorphous, even unwieldy net, and gathers nothing short of lifelike characters experiencing true relationships that are rancorous, hurtful, giddy, and transcendent ... Like the most beguiling fiction about friendship and girlhood, Brown’s heartful, humane debut will pull readers in and make them wonder how anyone survives either.
A brilliant portrait of female friendship, nearly the equal in honesty and subtlety to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels ... Brown perceptively chronicles the shifting power dynamics of the girls’ teenage years ... A moving conclusion.
An indelible picture of life in South Yorkshire ... Brown keenly explores the limits of the friends’ early bonds. This sharp and tender novel teems with life.
