Quite major ... One gawps...at its breadth and ambition. It’s a transnational tour de force that squeezes and expands time like an accordion, or a pair of lungs ... With its accumulation of small, logistical details of life — meals, sleep, sex, transportation, the bathroom, excursions, paperwork, rules, differences in electrical outlets...it demands, and delivers.
Khemiri...uses this grim prediction as a way to drive suspense in his sprawling, ruminative, at times very funny saga ... A clever, relatively unobtrusive device to explore the passage of time ... The prose gets a little bloated, with secondary characters stacking up. But stick with it because the final 200 or so pages are where it all comes together ... [Khemiri] knows when to tell and when to show ... Ultimately it’s a character-driven piece, with memorable women ... Ina...is particularly well drawn. In her we have the most poignant—and hilarious—depiction of a highly strung older sibling I’ve come across in contemporary fiction ... The most tender, funny and engrossing family saga I’ve read since The Bee Sting (2023) … It’s ambitious, it’s full of life, it’s a triumph. It’s the big baggy novel I’ve been waiting for.
Immersive ... Sprawling ... At more than 600 pages, this novel is a challenge to the modern attention span. However, the multidimensional layers, its honesty and rawness, make it a triumph. The pleasure is in the writing and the fascinating lives Khemiri constructs. Like its structure, time with this novel flies.
The story unspools with the clever structure following the Mikkola sisters through 35 years of their lives ... Told in vivid prose that explores the immigrant experience, family bonds, and a supposed curse passed from mother to daughter, Khemiri’s bold, intricate family
Writing in jaunty, run-on sentences often a page or more in length, Khemiri crafts a spectacularly meandering shaggy dog story, abandoning linear plot to focus on small incidents of daily life as Jonas and the sisters, whose lives only intersect occasionally, fall in and out of love and clatter through the world. Readers willing to go along for the lengthy ride should be delighted by Khemiri’s stubborn characters and bouncy prose.
Wondrous ... Blending humor and pathos, Khemiri perfectly encapsulates the push and pull of living in two different and sometimes dueling cultures. It’s a staggering achievement.
Long in the telling, but a lively portrait of familial, cultural, and amorous entanglements ... An expansive, complex tale ... It’s a daring concept, but Khemiri pulls it off capably, with that last minute containing an especially moving episode. The longer pieces have their longueurs, with Anastasia, drug-addled and lost, taking much of the story’s oxygen, but each part offers a tantalizing bit of a secret that the reader must pursue to the end in order to understand just how Jonas’ story intertwines with the Mikkolas’, even as their lives have over decades.
