[A] grand and devastating work ... Seems poised to be her breakout: Epically imagined, intricately constructed, conceptually engaging and packed with perfectly timed revelations ... [An] involving, humane novel.
The period detail is well-observed, but the descriptions are so profuse they verge on fetishistic. What you really crave, as a reader, is psychological acuity ... There are too many pantomime baddies and characters who are so unrealistic it seems they are being manipulated for dramatic effect. The gruesome treatment of children too often feels like a shallow ploy to unsettle the reader rather than a serious exploration of the ethical implications of scientific experimentation ... For a novel such as this to be truly poignant, it needs more subtlety and white space. It needs a novelist with a chisel rather than a sledgehammer.
Enjoyable but somewhat meandering ... [The] promising set-up fails to come to satisfying fruition ... In fits and starts, the full picture comes together. It is impressively detailed and far-reaching, though the attentive reader will have known more or less what is going on from the first sentence. The rest is just details, and explication.
Written with insight and brio, deftly balancing darkness and light, depth and pace. Set in its own distinctive time and space, it could have been extraordinary. Instead the ghost of Ishiguro stalks its pages, dragging behind it the inevitable clanking comparisons and fatally undermining the integrity of the world Chidgey has so painstakingly created.
Although the story moves slowly, readers of alternate-history and dystopian fiction will become totally immersed in these boys’ lives and their gradual understanding of who they really are.
At once a vast book and an intimate one. It’s a human story set against a grand-scale mystery that unfolds slowly, like flower petals opening ... Whether you’re a longtime Chidgey reader or this is your first of her novels, you won’t be disappointed.
