The attention to detail and organic sound in individual syllables, twining and weaving in a mesmerizing dance, is unmistakably potent in Peach. From the very first sentence, Glass asserts her prowess and control of language, showing remarkable restraint in molding the most powerful images ... The alliteration and assonance shape prose that demands the reader’s attention as they enter the world of the story and trust that the author is going to guide them through it carefully—if not safely. The beauty of Glass’ language is that it balances more than just sounds and images; it balances insight and instability, and the ways that the two complement each other ... Peach’s story ... is a haunting melody of the little truths we notice when everything else feels like a lie.
The staccato prose, repetition and alliteration here typify Glass’s writing style; the effect is propulsive and absorbing, the violent scenes and visceral details discomfiting. Glass tries to narrow the gap as much as possible between what her narrator feels and what the reader feels. Peach is only 98 pages long but, on finishing it, you won’t feel short-changed and you wouldn’t want it to be any longer—it is an intensely physical reading experience ... Glass’s publisher calls her writing 'lyrical' but it isn’t flowery and she rarely wastes words. Everything about Peach is clipped: the title, jabbing sentences, spare use of commas, characters’ names, unspecified setting. Glass is careful not to overburden her prose with imagery and, when she does deliver a striking image, it is all the more impactful for that ... The narrative is tightly controlled ... As a novel about an assault against a woman, Peach feels both timely and timeless.
Emma Glass’s fictional debut—a novella-cum-prose poem—packs one hell of a punch ... Its brevity and linguistic innovation are reminiscent of Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From and Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers, but Glass’s commitment to the visceral is like nothing else I’ve read. I pride myself on my strong stomach, but parts of this made my skin crawl ... Sometimes it felt like enforced sensory overload just for the sake of it, but Peach inhabits a strange, horror-story realm of the hyperreal, and Glass’s vision goes a long way towards portraying an experience that’s near-impossible to articulate.
Now we have Emma Glass’s absurdist, word-playing debut Peach, which has learned the art of female suffering but not escaped the snare ... Glass’s prose [is] propelled not so much by story or character as by sheer sound ... It’s arresting, if not always effective. The superficial association makes it easy to resist engaging with the scene described—and it’s so implausibly grim that when you do imagine it, it’s still hard to accept ... Glass aims for a woozy territory where the hilarious skirts the horrible. It’s at its best when Peach takes her grotesque revenge ... The climax is a generic formality, and it feels as unearned as it is preordained.
The dark poetic world of Emma Glass’s debut, Peach, immerses the reader in a young woman’s personal hell ... Through prose that is lyrical, mythic and yet wonderfully clear, Peach expounds on themes of good versus evil, and the base nature of desire, consumption and carnality ... The author’s care when it comes to language is evident throughout, with a rhythmic flow to her sentences and examples of wordplay in both headings and text ... Food and the natural world make for fitting metaphors throughout ... Not since Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy has such symbolism been used so effectively to make clear one woman’s brutal experiences[.]
...written in fluid, unconfined prose that calls to mind the work of Eimear McBride ... Glass, a practicing nurse in her native England, aptly portrays Peach’s real and mythical struggles between emotion and reason, power and trauma in this darkly arresting debut.
Glass’s fierce and mesmerizing debut straddles the line between fable and novel ... surprisingly tender moments...offer respite from an otherwise challenging story as it leads up to its unforgettable twist ending. Making full use of metaphor, alliteration, and wordplay, Glass’s remarkable prose stretches the boundaries of storytelling throughout, adding depth and strange beauty to this vital novel.
Glass’ stylized writing owes a clear debt to James Joyce’s experimental prose, something she acknowledges in a note at the end of the book. Although that's a difficult effect to sustain across even a volume as slender as this one, Glass’ prose is capable of breathtaking deftness. And the writing is much more than a gimmick: the clipped sentences and obsessive repetitions provide a terrifying window into a freshly traumatized psyche. With paragraphs that read like poems, this is a memorably crafted entry into the canon of revenge narratives.
