This portrait of friendship between a tantalizing but doomed young woman and her hooked admirer has a slightly creepy undertone reminiscent of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and very well sustained suspense, so that the reader is never quite sure what either woman will do next. What it was to be young in London in the last months of the twentieth century is brought to life with a relish worthy of early Angela Carter. Above all, with an honesty not unlike Elena Ferrante’s in her searing novel, Days of Abandonment, Kiare Ladner recounts with absolute accuracy the lengths and depths to which some women will go in order to free themselves from whatever it is that binds them. This is a debut to be cherished.
The twists and turns in the story prevent predictability, and Ladner's gorgeous shadowy writing creates a daunting but exhilarating world that’s difficult to leave.
Alluring ... Though some late revelations are unexpectedly disturbing given the lighter tone that precedes them, Ladner sustains a deliriously lurid rabbit hole for Meggie to go down as she fixates on her unreliable 'fairy tale friend' who she longs not only to know but also to be. The result is a tense and affecting tale of awakening.
Debut novelist Ladner is a gifted stylist; although her prose is not flowery, her sentences are smooth and occasionally surprising. The somewhat affectless tone of this novel, though, as well as the self-loathing tendencies of its narrator, can get tiresome ... Its treatment of queer sexuality also feels outdated: The trope of the mysterious, hypersexual, possibly unstable woman who tempts another female character to explore queer desire but will not quite seal the deal is distasteful and, again, familiar. Ladner obviously has talent; hopefully, in the future, she will use it to better ends ... A frustrating and derivative debut novel by an author with promise.
