The novel keeps evolving — from grief memoir to murder mystery to environmental battle, sliding along a slick surface of greasy New Age truisms ... My objection to the sentimentality sprinkled over The Life Impossible is not that it’s emotional excess; it’s that it’s emotional aspartame. Yes, of course, fantasy can be a comfort in times of despair, but prescribing a story as silly as this one in response to a heartfelt confession of grief and depression feels like recommending brighter wallpaper as a treatment for termite damage.
Though Grace engages in near-relentless self-loathing, Haig draws her with wisdom and heart ... A sinister hotel development plot and its predictable villain lack the juice of Grace’s arc ... Affecting.
A story of contrasts ... Haig’s wise and moving novel is both a mystery and a love story, a fantasy and a billet-doux to the planet. Perhaps its greatest gift lies in showing us that it is possible to dismantle the boundaries we have built, grasp the connections previously hidden, and appreciate life in all its richness. And the realisation that magic realism probably isn’t an oxymoron after all.
If you’re willing to suspend disbelief when reading fiction, this is an engaging story ... The entire book will take an average reader just a few hours to read. Really short chapters — some just a sentence long — help the pages fly. And while some may finish the last sentence shaking their head at the implausibility of it all, Grace’s realization that everything on Earth is worthy of admiration and preservation is a message the whole world can get behind.
Haig’s incomparable style, complete with short chapters and lovely descriptions, will draw readers back; they will be captivated by Grace’s shrewdness and bravery.
An instantly engrossing, page-turning delight ... Though it deploys familiar fantastic elements, this is a book that refuses oversimplification through genre: It’s part fantasy, part travel saga and part romance with one’s self. Like the bright, yearning human being at its center, it pulses with life, which makes it well worth reading for anyone who wants a hopeful, warm, very human journey that crackles with magic.
