Wasserberg is concerned with the nature of family, and the destructive powers of the ties that bind; it is possible to read the novel as an odd fable on the old doctrine of Original Sin ... the reader begins to perceive a great deal about the workings of Foxlowe to which Green is oblivious – a difficult narrative trick exemplified in Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, and one for which Wasserberg should be admired ... For some time after reading, I found myself unable to shake the images Wasserberg conjured up, instead sinking more deeply into them – which is testament to the storytelling powers of this talented novelist.
...not for the weak-stomached, fainthearted, or otherwise easily squeamish. From the first page, cruelty and violence — most often against children — is delivered in a gruesome fugue of agony and foreboding ... It's not a pretty scenario — yet Wasserberg renders it beautifully. Oozing the stately language and thick gloom of vintage Gothic literature, she infuses Foxlowe with looming dread ... While the violence of Foxlowe is not gratuitous, its choice of words sometimes is. Green's voice is inconsistent at times, even taking into account the fact that she ages into a teenager throughout the book ... the book's ending wraps everything up with a bone-chilling flourish that's both a little too pat and naggingly unsatisfying. But when it comes to crafting an immersive atmosphere of fear and unease, Foxlowe is a delicious slice of darkness.
...an insidiously creepy little book, modern in its understanding of psychology but purely Victorian gothic in its atmosphere ... Green’s naive voice — frank and straightforward even as she describes horrors — is heavily reminiscent of the child narrator of Emma Donoghue’s Room, but the setting, with its rotting house full of secrets and a shadowy and threatening woman flitting through it, is straight out of Shirley Jackson ... It’s not for the faint of heart, but it will stay with you.
...[an] absorbingly creepy debut ... It’s a literary perspective much like that of Emma Donoghue’s Room, and used to equally chilling effect here ... Wasserberg has a gift for allowing the reader into this world inch by inch while playing up its claustrophobic nature, as well as the aspects that make Green susceptible to its enchantments.
