Involving ... The book’s success in drawing together its threads is mixed... but it is easily most alive and nuanced when Freudenberger is writing about contemporary New York parenting, the impossible task of raising a teenager with quicksilver moods, the sheer physical exhaustion of it all ... To her vast credit, Freudenberger has a brain and a conscience, and it’s clear that she is trying to simultaneously scrutinize her experiences as a particular kind of parent in New York and tie them to a larger world.
Engaging ... The Limits is insightful about the ways the Covid crisis applied pressure to unsteady joints, as if testing which bonds would last ... By allowing readers to see these people from different angles, the author points up how rare it is to truly know ourselves and others. Yet the shifts can also be disorienting. Who is at the center of this book? In tying up the various yarns, Ms. Freudenberger dwells unexpectedly on some storylines and breezes past others.
The story’s structure reveals and amplifies these limits to knowledge, empathy, and imagination by generating a pervasive dramatic irony ... The mystery aspect of the plot, which revolves around Pia and Raffi, isn’t especially interesting and the reveal feels anticlimactic. These flaws and limitations notwithstanding, The Limits is a worthy novel with much to recommend it.
Freudenberger is fluent in every realm, social conundrum, and crime against the earth she brings into focus, keenly attuned to science and emotion, tradition and high-tech, race and gender, greed and conscience, irony and tragedy. Each character’s challenges are significant on scales intimate and global and their wrestling with secrets, anger, and fear grows increasingly suspenseful in this lambent, deeply sympathetic, and thought-provoking novel.
Freudenberger deftly employs the questions posed by climate change, seafloor mining and the struggle of modern medicine in the face of the unknown to shape the story.
The novel's heart lies in its characters' sharply drawn inner lives and their relationships with one another ... Sensitive, luminous, and sometimes wryly funny, The Limits is a nuanced portrait of the difficult, worthwhile work of connecting with others--even during a global disaster.
As in Freudenberger's previous work, scientific points are well integrated and explained, and the intelligent, precise narration is a pleasure, with graceful depiction of the characters' inner lives.
A layered story of race and privilege set against the backdrop of Covid-19 lockdowns ... Freudenberger’s longtime fans will find all the probing social insights and well-drawn characters they’ve come to expect from this accomplished author.
