It brings me no joy to inform you that whatever might have seemed conceptually far out or even unthinkable in 2016 about the premise of The Natural Way of Things has been more than met by our current moment ... As perverse as it may sound, though, I would still invite you to throw yourself on this brier patch simply for the pleasure of Wood’s sentences, the rich and prickly wonder of her mind at work. She’s a rare kind of writer and a formidable one.
Ferocious ... Short, gripping ... Wood is clearly offering a metaphor for our own everyday world in which girls are 'slut-shamed' ... What keeps all this from seeming doctrinaire is the book's sheer imaginative intensity. Wood's writing crackles with vivid precision.
Whatever transformation occurs reflects the brute metamorphosis of character into symbol, not the fullness of realism or the vividness of fiction ... Wants us to see how a society that treats women as naturally inferior traps, exploits, and denigrates them. Unfortunately, her plot confines these characters to another narrow set of roles, and most of them are portrayed as incapable of leaving their cage. The novel ends with the group of women gleefully giving up their own lives in exchange for small bags of luxury cosmetics—a metaphor so reductive and condescending that it scans as misogynistic ... If I were being generous, I’d say that Wood is simply reproducing oppressive social structures in fiction in order to reveal them. But I know that she can address this problem better.
Eerie and, in many ways, devastating ... Dares to venture into truth: dire, horrific circumstances does not negate natural compatibility truths amongst women, or, trauma does not always inherently bond ... Creates an excellent ambiance of hopelessness ... My main quibble with this book was that the reading experience of it all felt a little too déjà vu ... The movement of the story was, while moving at times, largely predictable ... The book is too grounded in reality to be pushing so hard against it.
A savagely, unapologetically feminist book ... Heavy-handed ... Wood takes apart the mentality of patriarchy not with a scalpel, but an axe. However, the axe cuts deep. The often simplistic characterisation is not an error, but a strategy ... Chillingly dark and unfashionably didactic. But it’s also compulsively readable, and bears its load of significance with effortless power. The fury of contemporary feminism may have found its masterpiece of horror.
A virtuoso performance, plotted deftly through a minefield of potential traps, weighted with allegory yet swift and sure in its narrative advance ... Wood's writing is urgent, bouncing with energy ... Provocative.
Part of the triumph of The Natural Way of Things is how it makes this nightmarish scenario feel not just possible but plausible ... But the sense of plausibility is also a function of how the novel’s sheer strangeness liberates its narrative to expose the violence and hatred that lie beneath the surface of our society, in a way a more conventional novel might not ... A confronting reminder of just how deeply inscribed the codes and structures that ensure women’s subjugation are.
Superb ... This is an extraordinary novel: inspired, powerful, at once coherent and dreamlike. While it's rich in symbols and in implications, much of it is brutally realist in mode, with its flights of imagination anchored in rational explanations: the result of drugs or fever dreams ... In its depth and breadth of meaning and its combination of imagination and craftsmanship, this is a profoundly literary novel ... Thought-provoking in all directions.
Terrifying ... Grotesque and thought provoking ... An overtly feminist narrative, and a scintillating commentary on misogyny ... The concept for the novel is strong and it’s inarguably a powerful, brave book. But somehow I felt like the epiphany, the light-bulb moment, the thing that was going to tie all these ideas together was always just around the corner.
Powerful and unsentimental ... I was gripped by the full-bodied, precise prose. Wood deftly shows us how we are savage, revolting, tender, desperate, and especially how we survive ... The ending of the novel is its own triumph.
Allegory at its best, a phantasmagoric portrait of modern culture's sexual politics textured by psychological realism and sparing lyricism ... Despite its overt message, the novel seldom feels programmatic because of Wood's gorgeous, elliptical style.
