The division between the book’s two narrators feels both seamless and unnecessary: Jen’s voice is more cutting, but each sounds pretty much the same. Across both halves, Millet unfurls a series of set pieces...with good humor and cascading streams of heavily referential rat-a-tat dialogue ... Millet is perhaps best known for A Children’s Bible, a 2020 National Book Award finalist and a New York Times Best Book of the Year. After the conceptual arias and cartwheels of that novel, this one (and her other most recent outing, Dinosaurs) can feel small and somewhat ordinary in comparison, as if Millet has pivoted from ambitious wide-screen blockbusters to talky, small-stakes independent films. Her deeper underlying interest here, though, seems to be in the slow interminable drip of grief and its effect on the human heart. It’s the subject that moves her most in literature, she told The Times Book Review in 2018, as long as it comes 'from an austere place, not one that’s squishy with emotion.' Fair Ones rarely squishes; it’s a warm and sometimes cosmic book, but not a sentimental one.
Millet spikes this transfixing tale with keen and caustic insights into friendship and love, privilege and obsession, delusion and truth, vulnerable children, aging parents, and imperiled nature, all amidst ambushing moments of wry humor and radiant beauty.
Her prose is sharp and quick, while her eccentric, deeply human characters balance grim humor with keen emotional insight. Themes of loneliness, survivors’ guilt, and chosen family run throughout, enriched by Millet’s understanding of the tiny loyalties, irritations, and intimacies that sustain long friendships. Particularly affecting is Millet’s portrayal of grief as an ongoing reshaping of identity rather than a single transformative event.
Millet insightfully illuminates the ways our mundane lives and usual modes of thinking might be stretched and challenged by a radical twist of fate. Millet continues to weave astute social commentary into sharply observed, character-driven plots.
Down-to-earth ... Driven less by intrigue or suspense than an interest in the stages of grief, Millet’s two-parter succeeds at reminding readers that living in the present is the best tribute to a life cut short. There’s much to admire in this refreshingly unsentimental story of moving on.
