Smart, reflective ... For the first third of the book or so, I stumbled over the novel’s execution. Clumsy prose weakens the story as a whole ... But as relationships complicate and deepen, and as the intensity ratchets up, all stylistic inconsistencies fall away. Silverman clearly has an exceptional talent for dramatic tension.
Silverman constructs an intricate, clever plot that braids together two separate stories ... Though the novel is a little slow to get off the ground and might have benefited from being 50 pages shorter, eventually it gathers unstoppable force as it moves toward a dramatic denouement that offers no easy conclusions.
Silverman... excels at bringing the lives of her disparate characters into focus. Atmospheric and profound, Silverman’s novel of defiance and acceptance shimmers with passion, repressed and unbridled.
Oddly, this book seems to be in sympathy with the attitudes and frustrations of the movements depicted, but the twin disasters are awful enough to scare an impressionable reader off radicalism altogether, especially because the upshot seems to be that political action can ruin people without changing the world at all ... In the end, the idea that one generation repeats the mistakes of the last is dramatized a bit too faithfully, and the ending leaves some big questions unanswered.
Incisive if somewhat overstuffed ... Silverman takes a lot on, and not all of it sticks ... Still, Silverman manages to build suspense as they gradually connect the dots between the parallel stories. There’s plenty of intrigue bubbling beneath the surface of this surprisingly complex novel.
