In a book that surges and swells and sometimes dissipates...[t]he fragmented narrative reflects the littered and eroded interiority of a woman in duress, numbed and dulled by what she’s been through ... what’s most hypnotic is what’s revealed beneath the waves of language: the impossibility of leaving one’s past behind ... There are unsettling and disturbing moments in the novel that aren’t expanded on and given the space to unfold, but perhaps that’s Freeman’s point: the tides shift. All that is revealed can be obscured again.
Mercurial ... Freeman’s prose is taut and illuminating, a style that manages to be both detached and emotionally devastating .. A powerful intelligence underpins this work, which concerns itself with familiar subjects of loss, legacy and love. So accomplished is Freeman’s interrogation of these matters that it is hard to believe it is her first book ... [A] beautifully observed, elegantly written debut ... Bleak but beautiful, a life understood instead of under siege.
Taut and affecting, Tides proceeds in fragments ... Just as the sea offers Mara scant sanctuary, Freeman’s unsparing prose leaves a cold sting ... If, at times, some metaphors are needlessly reiterated...the overall effect is quietly seductive. We are drawn frictionlessly into Mara’s psyche, and then made to stay there.
The experience of reading such a novel is like travelling through a series of expertly designed studio flats. You marvel at every interior you come to: a whole unto itself, not a foot wrong in the design. But then you turn the page and enter yet another four walls, the last beginning to fade from your mind. Only at the end are you able to conceive of all these paragraphs at once, imagine a whole tower block of crafted text ... Freeman’s chosen form, then, acts as a visual manifestation of her protagonist’s state: her refusal of proximity, her abnegation of all those people and places that had previously been contiguous to her life ... This mirroring of structure and plot is smart. It can be very effective. But it also feels too artificial, too neat, to the extent that it draws attention away from the plot and towards its own ingenuity. It is an example of American literary critic and poet Yvor Winters’s 'fallacy of imitative form', his attack on modernist poetry wherein the 'form succumbs to the raw material of the poem', weakening both the poem’s ability to convey its meaning and the form itself ... Freeman hammers her paragraphs down into perfected, indivisible units, without any bulk or extraneous matter. When it works, her images are light as gas...but when it becomes the only thought on a page, without other images to jostle against, it loses its vitality ... In Tides, the splitting of paragraphs between pages does not become more than a formal pretension, one that slows down and makes less coherent an otherwise very strange and poignant novel.
Tides is a brief novel, told in intense, concentrated scenes, some no longer than a sentence. ... As the book progresses, her story grows clearer and she allows herself to feel. The ending isn't happy, exactly, but there is hope. This brief novel is touching but not depressing, bleak but also beautiful.
... a slim novel, but its structure encourages slow and reflective reading. Broken up into brief sections, often just a sentence or two, the text is set on the page like a series of short vignettes or reflections, surrounded by white space that encourages pauses for contemplation. The book is deeply sad, recounting as it does the dramatic and painful end of one family. But it’s also strangely hopeful and beautiful, as Mara makes the brave decision to move forward on her own, into a future that is far from certain but ready for her to make her own.
... sparse and unconventional ... This pace is somewhat disquieting at first, though it eventually settles into a rhythm that feels like time itself ... The beauty of Freeman's prose lies as much in this unexpected cadence as in the contrast between beauty and harshness tucked into every page ... In its poetic unfolding, Tides reveals itself to be a stunning and revelatory tale of the dissolution of one woman's life, her unexpected ties to the sea, and the many ways present selves are tied to their pasts ... In this stunning debut novel, a woman's life unravels, builds and unravels again across a series of sparse and staggering vignettes.
Freeman’s prose is beautiful and translucent. Mirroring the ebb and flow of water, short paragraphs leave lots of empty spaces on the page, enhancing the emotional gut punches latent in the text, while moments of heightened action run uninterrupted. In the end, Mara continues to carry her old and new pains but ultimately reasserts herself, promising readers a glimmer of hope and new beginnings.
Told in image-heavy, crystalline fragments of prose, sometimes only one or two sentences to a page, Freeman’s novel reads like a shattered mirror gradually being pieced together, though the reflection, as in real life, never comes perfectly clear. For much of the novel’s first half, Freeman keeps Mara as a cipher, less a character and more simply a vessel for grief and self-destructive impulses. But as Mara’s character sharpens into focus, the narrative restraint gives way in pieces like a sudden calving of ice. What is left is a portrait of a woman’s psyche pared to the core, to unsettling effect ... An intense and lyrical debut.
An emotionally charged story of wanderlust and longing unfolds in Freeman’s captivating debut ... With an intricate narrative and in deceptively simple language, Freeman captures the full extent of loss. Complicated and enchanting, this prismatic examination of emotional endurance is a winner.
