Cousins is unabashed, treating timely themes in ways that some may find insensitive, while cautioning against the convictions that might engender such judgments ... It's a joy welcoming the outlandish Cousins to the stellar family of 21st-century Argentine authors available in English.
Kit Maude’s translation nails this breathless voice, highly crafted to seem uncrafted. Venturini knows just how long she can afford to pursue a digression or a run-on sentence, how to bring in a sense of character expressively ... Aside from the contemporary feel of the voice, and the book’s focus on misogyny and abuse, there’s a gameyness to its black humour — the way it savours revulsion about physical disability, and treats the body as a curiosity — that feels startlingly against the grain of more recently published books.
Fearless, shocking, and utterly engrossing ... Cousins is hardly a redemptive story — Venturini pokes enough mean-spirited fun at Catholicism that the very idea of redemption seems at odds with her book — and yet, through art, offers its characters the same startling freedom that Venturini offers herself.
... this is not a feminist novel, even if the abused are all women. Nor is it an uplifting triumph-over-disability story ... [Yuna's] vocabulary develops somewhat, but not her understanding, for the novel’s wager is to recount moral and physical violence with impregnable naivety – a cynical authorial jest, I felt, rather than a mark of empathy with the disabled.
