Manages superbly (and efficiently) to be many things: A beguilingly simple tale. A complicated morality play. A sensitive evocation of a time ... Lots of novels twice as long have half as much heft ... Majumdar offers readers the rare sophomore novel that outshines her justly celebrated debut. It’s a contemporary classic.
Majumdar creates a tense and deeply compassionate portrait of desperation, fear and the combined selflessness and selfishness of parenthood ... An unsubtle novel. Both its stakes and its morality...are clear from the start. Occasionally it gets didactic, and its ending is simply too eventful to have much impact ... What saves the book from sentimentality, and makes it a true literary achievement, is the attention and beauty with which Majumdar evokes the details of love ... Detail is the strongest thing in A Guardian and a Thief. It conveys the nuances of not only love but also wisdom, outweighing the book’s shortcomings. It also makes this novel, wrenching though it often is, a true joy to read.
The [pleasures] to be gained from investment in this book — and while it is not a long novel, it does take a certain kind of emotional investment — are mostly quiet. They are contemplative. The craft of this novel is something approaching immaculate ... The focus of the storytelling remains close, lightened — if that is the word — occasionally by moments of stunning description ... There is beauty here. But the novel is not light ... An achievement. It deserves praise. It deserves study. It deserves to be read, and sat with, and thought about.
Unfolds as a mesmerizing morality play that demonstrates how categories like 'victim' and 'thief' collapse under conditions of scarcity. Yet the novel suffers from what feels like a mismatch between the conditions it depicts and the worldview of the people who populate it. Majumdar’s characters are contending with intractable 21st-century problems while adhering to the stories of an earlier era. In a novel that is so alert to where climate change is leading the world, a narrative frame that illustrates migration as linear and largely redemptive feels anachronistic ... Majumdar lavishes her characters with careful attention, and so the reader comes to regard their most troubling actions as justified, if not inevitable ... Majumdar’s psychological precision is what makes the novel’s geopolitical weaknesses feel so pronounced. Her depiction of everyday human interaction is rich and persuasive, but the larger world her characters inhabit feels underdeveloped ... Majumdar’s inconsistent world building ultimately undermines the reader’s ability to invest in the story.
Exquisitely wrenching ... Majumdar brilliantly blurs right and wrong, ethics and legality. In such frenzied times, who is the guardian and who is the thief can never be clear.
