Superb ... Clark’s novel is a brilliantly deprived bildungsroman ... From the novelist’s point of view, the story’s fatal glamour skews it toward memoir: Why fictionalize such remarkable facts? Clark’s wise remedy is to strip her fiction of most of those facts, reducing the local references so that the narrative shifts away from singular autobiography toward singular emblem.
t’s a testament to Harriet Clark’s skill that the true subject of this novel—the long, damaging legacy of three generations of mother-daughter estrangement—slowly reveals itself ... One of the funniest books I have read in a while, with deadpan one-liners, bitterly comic in the way only someone aware of the stakes can make a joke ... Meditative.
Reads as though it has intermittent weather, clear and obscured, literal and mysterious. A movingly written and enjoyably unexpected debut about sifting fate from a set of curious and challenging circumstances.
Quietly devastating ... Elegant and unsettling ... In spare, luminous prose, Clark delivers a masterful study of internalized confinement and the quiet, fierce love that can persist within it. An intelligent coming-of-age novel that earns its unease.
