Deeply serious and engrossingly playful, and it lavishly rewards serious, playful attention ... Lacey is fascinated by literary form and by the metaphors for literary form, finding fiction at once a constraint and a space for play ... The two modes of the book, which I hesitate to call fiction and memoir because neither is wholly committed to realism or reality, undermine each other, with images and anecdotes reappearing in transmuted form ... The questions are constant, implicit, teasing, elaborated rather than answered in the dark mirror of life writing.
Lacey pulls off this looping-of-perspectives with an omniscient third-person moving dreamlike between four dimensions: Marie’s grief and Edie’s, past and present ... Lacey’s details are interchangeable as boutique Legos. She takes this endless fungibility to its logical conclusion and replicates the details in her own repeating memory, and while the result is a brilliantly structured book, this also has the effect of ensuring that nothing new ever happens in it.
A category-defying, creative, thought-provoking piece of literature on loss, betrayal, friendships, faith, and more ... A sui generis work, like no other.
A lissome philosophical experiment that blurs the lines of (auto)fiction through its two narratives ... This potentially divisive work is sure to lure fans of high-brow and mesmerizing writing by R.O. Kwon and Sarah Manguso.
Ambitious ... Lacey’s writing is at its most vital in the fiction section; the memoir skews trite ... Still, her vulnerable search for answers and insertion of rhyming resonances across the two narratives excite. The author’s fans will be glad they took the plunge.
