The novel surprises us by blending visceral horror with laugh-out-loud humor. This unnerving stylistic collision is sustained throughout ... Dermansky plays masterfully with perspective: Are the people around Allison... all they seem? Should we be wary of Allison’s judgment, or has physical trauma somehow bestowed acute mental clarity? Either way, the results are hilarious. Dermansky’s offbeat humor and spare prose make Allison’s mind a thrilling and wholly unusual place to be ... This is a wickedly entertaining read from first to last.

Rather than convince the reader of a character’s particularities via an exhaustive inventory of details and memories, Dermansky is a master of that slippery thing we might call voice. She conjures rather than describes. Instead of turning the lens of the novel on Allison, she embeds us in Allison’s consciousness until the shape of Allison’s thoughts becomes our own. In this way, Dermansky creates an experience in fiction that is powerfully and unnervingly realistic. How often do I ask myself how I am feeling, what I am thinking, or what I remember that is the key to my buried trauma? ... Allison either wants or does not want, there is no in between. But the span of time between Allison wanting and Allison doing is short. She is a character who does not know what she will want tomorrow or even five minutes from now, but once she knows, she acts. The result is a narrative that lives in a precise kind of now, that feels like the active unfolding of a consciousness. In this way, Dermansky achieves what it really feels like to be a person rather than its literary simulation ... What makes this book so funny? One answer is simple pleasure and delight, as in the elements that make up this novel are almost universally delightful ... dialogue, of which Dermansky is one of my favorite living practitioners, calling to mind the sonic truth of Grace Paley and the delicious weirdness of George Saunders (Paley’s student) ... Dermansky packs a great deal of dramatic action into Hurricane Girl, without straining credulity or sliding into melodrama. She has a particular talent for wedging the mundane and/or logistic up against Big Events ... There is a sense that Allison is profoundly alienated from herself and in some ways uninterested in making her life into any kind of coherent story, which is a fascinating choice for the protagonist of a story to make ... Allison’s story is a powerful comedic indictment and investigation of the darkness of American millennial life, where literally nothing we were told to want is stable, not even a house, let alone a home. The book seems to ask the question: What is a life, a personality, a body, when none of the systems underpinning the things we were taught to want are working the way they should and everything is crumbling?

Readers hungry for a novel that's equal parts sweet and sour will find plenty of sugar and vinegar in Hurricane Girl ... Some characters are caricatures rather than fully fleshed-out creations, but readers will enjoy Dermansky's humorous one-liners and deceptively light touch. And they will sympathize with Allison, a woman tired of the way men treat her and who fights her inclination to go through life like a swimmer in the ocean: floating aimlessly, drifting wherever the waves take her.

The book’s denouement may be less surprising than its finale, but it’s no less deliberate than Allison’s tooth-cleaning process ... Dermansky brings a woman back to life as the sun emerges from the clouds. Allison’s choices may have seemed baffling, but in the end, her existence at last belongs only to her. It might be too early in the author’s career to say she believes her characters can only make bad choices. But in Allison, she has found one capable of breaking through stale scenarios like a powerful, cleansing storm.

The bright cover says summer, and one might do well to read it on the beach, for the narrative mode is brisk and pleasurable and undemanding. It is a very funny book—deadpan, occasionally ludicrous. One must have a high tolerance for coincidence in fiction, which, fortunately, I do ... There is definitely something wrong with Allison, but Dermansky is too fine a writer to editorialize about exactly what. We are allowed to be immersed in Allison’s confusion ... Dermansky’s prose is stylish and deceptively simple. Not exactly Hemingway-esque, although it gets a lot of mileage out of purposeful repetitions. Also, it seems easy to imitate and probably is not. She risks inelegance for effectiveness. She uses modifiers like goopy. There are few metaphors and few sensory descriptions, but the existing descriptions are unfancy and precise ... What Dermansky’s style remarkably conveys is what this world feels like: the texture of Allison’s mind in all its contradictions, as if we the reader are witness to the currents of Allison’s inner sound ... The coincidences are not so much a stylistic tick as they are part of Dermansky’s reality effect. The same stuff keeps rising in our consciousness like waves

Dermansky surrounds Allison with disappointing men, making her trust issues understandable, and she effectively captures Allison’s brain fog and inability to make reasonable decisions, particularly following a traumatic brain injury. The ending is satisfying, if unconventional. For readers of general fiction.

Allison might be a hot mess, but she’s also eminently relatable in a world filled with pitfalls for women who try to figure out what they want for themselves.

Lackluster ... There’s some deliciously dry humor...but the surreal aura doesn’t really develop into anything substantial or comprehensible. Readers are left with a Moshfegh-like vibe, but without a strong character or story. This one is safe to skip.

Sentences with fewer than 10 words, mostly one-syllable each, are the building blocks of this stripped-down narrative—the tone is so consistent it's a kind of poetry ... Dermansky has come up with a seemingly artless but in fact very controlled novel ... Small comic gems sparkle in their deadpan settings on every page ... The only bad thing about this book is that you will likely finish it in one sitting.