Freud is brilliant at capturing the time in a personal and a global sense ... The details are so vivid you feel like you’re remembering the events yourself ... Highly impressive.
The narrative is ragged and deliberately unstructured, but Freud’s control is masterful. Her prose is lucid, effortless and evocative. It captures the slippery, often conflicting nature of memory and the subtle devastation of unresolved family wounds ... A breathless description of missed connections and half-remembered moments. Like memory itself, it is fractured. And like memory, it lingers long after the last line.
Accomplished ... Billed as a novel but arguably occupies an interesting grey area between novel and memoir, resisting the expectations of both and creating something all of its own ... Interesting ... It’s a fascinating tangle of fact and fiction that refuses easy answers, and a subtle, clever, evocative book.
She delivers satisfaction in the book’s full-circle conclusion which connects past and present in several forms, explores abiding psychologies, and addresses the repetitive pattern. A deft, smart, indulgent work that delivers—finally—its necessary integration.
