Best known as a memoirist and essayist, Manguso also writes poetry, and this is apparent in her fiction. Though dealing with life’s ugly, messy truths, her writing is compact and beautiful ... Manguso is terribly poignant on little Ruthie’s faith in a maternal love that isn’t really there, and her dawning comprehension of what might have made it impossible. But in damning increments, she also shows how feminine identity in America can be built up with material objects...and then torn down by violation, sexual and otherwise ... So masterly is Manguso at making beauty of boring old daily pain that when more dramatic plot turns arrive — suicides, teen pregnancies — they almost seem superfluous, visitations from an after-school special. The book is strong enough as a compendium of the insults of a deprived childhood: a thousand cuts exquisitely observed and survived. The effect is cumulative, and this novel bordering on a novella punches above its weight.

... a novel in which nothing very much happens for about 100 pages but small objects – Barbie dolls, Girl Scout sashes, bubble gum, nail polish, a knitted scarf – assume vast significance, and small kindnesses feel overwhelming ... unfolds like a much darker version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda – only told at a glacial speed, with no Miss Honey coming to the rescue ... composed of units of writing that are sometimes so short, they feel like wisps of thought. Fans of Gwendoline Riley and Catherine Lacey’s unconventional stories about family and community dysfunction are also likely to appreciate Manguso’s pitiless, minutely observed prose ... But Very Cold People is so different from anything else I’ve read that it feels a bit fatuous to compare it to other works of fiction. We often talk about writers getting under the skin of their characters, but Manguso has a forensic interest in hair follicles, rashes, effluvia and infected cuts. By writing about these girls’ relationships with their bodies, she picks at the scab of generational trauma and shame. It’s a masterclass in unease. I must confess that I was relieved when the novel was over but it was so skilful, so strange and so unique that I suspect it will stay with me for a very long time.

It’s impossible to read Manguso’s novel without wondering how much of the writer’s own life is in it ... But to look for her between the lines misses the point in a book that gets at larger truths about countless girls caught in the cycle of generational trauma ... Manguso’s attention to the chilliness and reservation of certain New Englanders crackles like a room-temperature beverage poured over ice ... Ruthie’s short, vivid memories accumulate like snowflakes on a windowsill, many centered on her complicated relationship with her difficult mother, a woman whose coldness is its own distinctive parenting style ... Manguso captures both the repelling and beautiful aspects of girls’ bodies...what’s visible and what shimmers right underneath the surface ... What elevates Very Cold People above a traditional coming-of-age novel is Manguso’s insistence on not being fooled by exterior markings ... Manguso portrays the fears surrounding girlhood with a blistering clarity.

The novel is a searing catalogue of pinched bitterness that might best be summarized as 'no fun here.' But with her gemlike apercus, Manguso renders this bleakness oddly fascinating ... [Manguso] has a distinctive and pungent style. She is known for her aphoristic precision and intense, adamantine paragraphs. Her novel thus has the effect of a series of sharply focused snapshots.

Intellectually rigorous and formally meticulous, her work tends to possess a seriousness of tone and a concerted spareness, as well as a biting perfectionism and a zealous commitment to brevity. Lean and crisp, making a judicious use of its ample white space, her debut novel, Very Cold People, continues in this exacting vein ... With glacial precision and mordant wit, Manguso delineates a milieu in which class and gender get silenced by lip service to the American dream ... Manguso has an unerring eye for the details that characterized a certain kind of Gen X girlhood ... But far from being an exercise in nostalgia, the novel's memories accumulate into something more unsettling. Ruthie's powers of observation catalog everything ... Like a sculpture made of ice cubes, each spartan prose brick accumulates into a single structure. Short as it is, Very Cold People feels monumental: an icy cenotaph for a not-so-distant past.

The book has a fairy-tale quality, a ring of the nursery rhyme ... The book’s symmetries, prototypical figures, and brutality heighten the Grimmish mood. You half expect the characters to be devoured by wolves ... Here, as in many fairy tales, a feeling of magic corresponds to the feeling of the unknown. With its adult narrator trying to recover the intuitions of her younger self, Very Cold People reminded me of My Brilliant Friend, ... Very Cold People is itself a very cold book, with banks of white space piled up around Manguso’s short, accretive paragraphs. The most significant incidents—a slap, a seduction, a suicide—exist only as rumors, referred to after the fact, and the material that does make it to the page behaves like anti-narrative ... Manguso’s method is to break narrative into wisps of inner life and bits of observation. She marshalls the means of poetry (compression, obliqueness) for essayistic ends, pursuing not the finished thought but the feeling of thinking ... Manguso seems particularly caught on how the threats that are ushered out of sight in Waitsfield refuse to stay hidden. They slosh and seep; they infect the surfaces that conceal them ... Manguso’s writing approximates Waitsfield’s spirit, allowing her to weaponize the poetic principle that the words uttered in lieu of other words are never actually empty ... Manguso addresses race and ethnicity only at the level of metaphor, and the book’s approach to class feels almost as gestural ... She doesn’t seem to view social prejudice or economic inequality as New England’s original sin. That honor goes, too neatly, to the systematic sexual abuse of children ... By the final pages, the novel’s full store of frigidity seems to have spilled from one tap ... Ruthie’s halting narration and lack of affect suggest a girl caught within a net of pain; the task of the book is to unmask each node, or victim, in the net, moving suspensefully inward. But Very Cold People adds nuance by investigating how substitution and silence can be misguided acts of love, not just symptoms of damage ...There is a novel that [Manguso] would like to write, perhaps, in which coldness unfailingly expresses warmth, the part always summons the whole, and inconsequential details never fail to glow with urgency. That novel is an impossibility.

Disquieting ... Something is wrong with Ruthie, too, or she would connect things better than she does. Her voice is affectless, remote, giving almost the same weight to every experience ... This oblique approach has its risks, because it seems to lack development. Only halfway through the novel...does the voice of the book finally deepen and fill out. Yet even then it continues to tell its story in piecemeal form, one memory overlapping another. For Ruthie, and so for us, the disparate memories keep arriving, never fusing into a plot, simply relayed in a lightweight torrent of details ... Manguso employs a technique normally used by novelists to give background information or to join one scene to another, but here it is the primary mode of narration. It is a brave choice, because the larger picture emerges only gradually ... The writing is skilful and exact, and gives off the sense that its coldness is never truly cold ... [Manguso's] passion flashes through in occasional bursts of imagery, with their small emotional charges. Such moments come as a relief, signalling heat under the permafrost ... What has caused this damage, this inability to connect? Just as the question has come at us obliquely, so does the answer, hinted at in shadowy phrases, never expressly said. It is up to the reader to see the pattern in the carpet, because Ruthie never will.

It is difficult to do a lot with a little, and Manguso, a poet as well as an essayist and memoirist, covers quite a bit of distance with a minimum of means ... Manguso’s prose is an uncommon mix of economy and obsession ... Very Cold People stays true to her style...it favors incident and mood over linear storytelling ... Manguso’s language can be exquisitely spartan and laconic ... Manguso captures the bewilderment of childhood in Ruth’s flat observations about situations she doesn’t fully understand, supplemented by feral imaginings ... Some passages beggar belief, and seem calculated for an effect whose significance I can’t quite detect ... Manguso’s descriptions of girlhood make for some of the novel’s best moments ... Manguso is wonderful at the slow fade of this blissful innocence, the way it is supplanted by dangers that infiltrate at the fringes of awareness ... The projection of Ruth’s fantasies onto another woman provides the most generous account of her inner yearnings ... Manguso doesn’t let men off the hook for their actions—which include sexual abuse—but that reckoning isn’t a major part of the novel. Her focus is the way mothers allow shame to perpetuate ... Every girl becomes a victim, as if it were unavoidable, and they grow up to be mothers who are complicit in the perpetuation of that trauma, partly through their silence ... Manguso’s evocation of this assemblage of women suggests a desire to share pain, to recognize one another’s suffering, and perhaps to find a way out, but by couching it in a tradition of lies that extends on and on, without resolution or relief, the trauma seems to erase any distinction between individuals and forgoes any recognition of distinct inner lives ... Manguso illustrates [a] paradox, but she does so at the expense of her characters, who are dispensed with when they no longer serve a purpose ... The very forms of Manguso’s books—fragmentary, aphoristic, discrete, or however one chooses to characterize them—resist clear narrative paths, and in doing so they can invite new possibilities. However, for Ruth, whose future we just glimpse at novel’s end, there is only a hint of what it means to live beyond the damage of her childhood, and Very Cold People stagnates—a story of trauma that does not move beyond its own crisis.

Manguso reveals Ruthie’s story paragraph by paragraph in a choppy narrative style. Readers are given a series of seemingly disconnected and roughly chronological memories and remembrances recounted with a brash poeticism and an unsparing, even dispirited manner. Ruthie’s eye is clinical and rarely emotional. Hers is a parallel to the coldness she calls out in others, but its source is different from theirs and serves Manguso’s storytelling well ... Manguso’s portrayals are always on the verge of caricatures: the vain and neurotic Jewish mother and the cheap, angry Italian father. But then readers are made to recall that this lens belongs to Ruthie, and a young Ruthie at that ... The novel is a record of casual cruelties and observations of a confusing society ... Moments of raw reflection (as opposed to description) are rare here, but all the more affecting when they arrive ... Manguso’s unique voice makes Very Cold People challenging, but this worthwhile novel is compelling, smart and full of heartache.

[An] arresting debut novel ... This is a portrait of the sort of acute discomfort with the world that is often taken as a sign of psychic fragility ... Here and in her previous nonfiction work, Manguso favors spare, staccato prose, divided into unindented and liberally spaced paragraphs ... But minimalism can suggest a willed resistance to tension, a drive for order; Very Cold People revels in danger, disarray, and the ugly mash of pride and resentment that invariably characterizes life on the outside. Certain descriptions have the disquieting hum of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights ... if Ruth’s blinkered state is realistic, it can also feel flat and oppressive. One craves some sense of contrast or relief, which the novel supplies only fleetingly ... Manguso’s achievement is to lead us into this role, which seems an act of delicate optimism in itself. To offer a witness is to disturb the barriers trauma raises around the self, and to prove that devastation need not be absolute.

[Manguso's] prose is, like a red wine reduction, boiled down to its most potent iteration, wherein anything superfluous has been melted off. Put another way: It’s all killer, no filler with Manguso ... In her first novel, Very Cold People, Manguso is as controlled as ever on the sentence level, but her aperture has widened ... It’s not evident from exactly what distance she’s telling this story, but it’s from an adult’s perspective—one that offers clarity without pressing too heavily on the page ... Manguso writes in brief, paragraph-length passages, though the form is perhaps less effective here than in her nonfiction. If rendered visually, the novel’s plot might be drawn as a flat line, stretching out horizon-like with occasional juts. As a whole, the book reads more like a memoir than a novel ... What at first looks solely like nostalgia for a pre-internet adolescence becomes more complex over the course of Very Cold People ... Manguso pays similar attention to the Northeastern weather. Here her language is at its most evocative, its loveliest ... Manguso’s contention in 300 Arguments that 'Not every narrative is an arc' certainly applies here, but that’s not to say nothing changes. One of the novel’s most significant movements is Ruthie coming to more fully understand—but not necessarily forgive—her mother’s cruelty. This understanding follows the recounting of a series of sexual abuses she and her friends experience ... It can be frustrating and wearisome, narratively speaking, to encounter this story so frequently. Yet its pervasiveness is exactly the point Manguso is making ... The writer underscores their heartbreaking normalcy by depicting them quickly and at a glance. It’s here in the final stretch that the novel’s form—those short, discrete paragraphs—is most effective.

Manguso’s trademark discrete paragraphs, separated by (snowy) white spaces, accumulate in detailed taxonomies of food and eating habits, bodies and their injuries, school and its tribulations. Formal and informal social structures receive similarly anthropological attention, from class distinctions and the nuances of bullying to the rituals and tokens of gift exchange, which may hold this frigid society together but never truly bonds it ... the novel’s abrupt ending seems at once narratively inadequate and an implicit narrative reward for the self-awareness Ruthie shares, not with her peers, but with the other observant, bookish girls of literature ... Manguso is an exquisitely astute writer, and there is something admirable about her refusal to bow to predictable plot tropes that might rescue Ruthie more definitively—or condemn her. Still, her efforts to describe 'everything' about Waitsfield may leave readers more chilled than satisfied … which is perhaps the point.

The containment and even pacing of the short sections preserve these fragments as if in a block of ice. The details of a 1980s childhood are the easiest to recall, because they are the most colourful and least harmful ... The small alliances forged by the 'girls of Waitsfield' are the warm living nerve system of the novel. They wait together to grow up, or not; to be liberated, to move elsewhere, to commit their own atrocities or to raise their children with “ordinary love”. But the novel is a testament to the marks left by the past from generation to generation.

Much of Very Cold People wields a kind of detached, anthropological power, portraying the world through the accumulation of telling details. But abruptly, near the end, the narrator has an awakening to the terrible reason for her mother’s repression, a trauma that afflicts young women that runs even deeper than class. The diagnosis is not new—just the opposite—but it is startling to find the narrator bursting into passionate appeals after so much cold-eyed recollection.

Now [Manguso] expands her purview — though not her terse style — with a chilling first novel ... not a novel one reads for plot, but I hesitate to say too much about how the stories of Ruth's friends, aunt, cousins, and mother deftly dovetail in this sobering portrait of the damage wrought by predatory adults on young girls' lives. The glimmer of hope in this understated variant of what has come to be called the trauma plot is in the narrator's escape and gradual understanding of the terrible circumstances that warped her mother ... While not a book to brighten a winter day, Very Cold People does what we ask of good literature: It absorbs our attention and stirs empathy and reflection.

Sarah Manguso's turns of phrase have a way of instantly crystallizing into idiom. Ever since I finished reading her novel Very Cold People, shards of her precision keep surfacing in my head ... Chapters are organized less around major events that propel the narrative forward than loose themes—class tensions, maternal cruelties, middle school anxieties, the ubiquity of sexual assault and intergenerational trauma—illustrated by snapshots of Ruthie’s memory. That’s to be expected. You don’t come to a writer like Manguso looking for plot but for distillation, those moments of perfect capture ... Manguso’s character study of Linda is reason alone to read Very Cold People. She manages to make this woman both vilely self-centered and still somehow deserving of sympathy ... Manguso is an utterly unsentimental writer, and there is no true thawing of these cold people or this cold place. Which is exactly as it ought be in her first novel—a sharp icicle.

Can a writer celebrated as a miniaturist succeed at a more expansive form like the novel? In Manguso’s case, the answer is a resounding yes ... In the novel’s early pages the short blocks of text replicate the emerging consciousness of a young child, focused on the sensory and material world, but these details gradually cohere into a larger, sociological view of her surroundings ... The reader understands that this is a story about escape in which the narrator must grow into the person capable of writing this story ... The bleakness of Manguso’s vision is tempered by a rigorous attention to style; as dark as its subject matter is, I found myself turning pages because I wanted to keep reading Manguso’s pared-down prose, with its immaculate attention to the telling details ... If at times a certain austerity seems to hold the reader at arm’s length, the beauty of Manguso’s prose keeps pulling us back in ... Very Cold People is a coming-of-age novel set in a very specific time and place that feels universal in its explication of troubled girlhood; it feels, in short, like an instant classic.

Manguso...grew up in a similar town on the east coast, and the duality of a life lived amongst far wealthier peers is another theme that often repeats throughout her work. In Very Cold People, she pays homage to this wealth gap while also illuminating how wealth or a lack thereof doesn’t necessarily mean protection for young girls from a world that’s desperate to objectify and sexualize them as soon as possible ... Often, our belief in ourselves was dependent on our belief in the boys and men around us. If they liked you, you were doing something right. If not, keep trying. Very Cold People understands this experience, and in Manguso’s capable hands, the story of Ruthie grows out of itself to encompass a world of feminine time in which the most innocent of actions can be mistaken for unwanted attention.

Manguso resists the narrative expectations of epiphany and forward momentum. Change isn’t willed or even occasioned. She doesn’t arrive at meaning so much as blow the dust off it ... Manguso’s preference for patterns, for showing pain not as the result of a singular occurrence but of a cast of light, something in the air, suits the book’s subject ... The snow metaphor is spread a little thin by the end, prettily implying depth.

Gritty ... Manguso paints a haunting portrait of innocence lost, with snippets of prose that gradually evolve from brief paragraphs to pages. These first-person windows into Ruthie’s upbringing, though initially jarring and seemingly mundane, masterfully unveil the tragic and disturbing fates of girls in Waitsfield ... A gripping debut novel on the vulnerability of girlhood for readers who enjoy steady but intense storytelling.

Manguso's book hosts impressions so scorchingly immediate that readers may half wonder if the childhood depicted on the page is theirs ... Manguso...is a sensational writer ... But with 100-odd pages behind them, readers may well wonder: Is Very Cold People truly a novel, as advertised? Manguso certainly massages her themes...but as vignette-like paragraphs skip by, each bluntly delineated from the next by a page break, there seems to be no forward momentum beyond the ticking of time ... Readers should hang in there. Manguso's accreting vignettes retroactively assume a shape toward the end of Very Cold People, when something happens that fulfills every novel's basic requirement: life for at least one character in it irrevocably changes ... Sarah Manguso's breathtakingly well-written first novel seems like a grab bag of the narrator's impressions of her childhood, until its ending casts everything that precedes it in fresh light.

A bracing coming-of-age story and master class in controlled style ... Manguso is a lovely writer about unlovely things—her previous books were built around lyric essays on suicide and autoimmune disease, and here she depicts her protagonist’s quiet agony with a poet’s eye ... The elegance doesn’t diminish the emotional impact of her story and the journey of becoming mature enough to understand transgression, be horrified by it, and search for a means to escape it ... A taut, blisteringly smart novel, both measured and rageful.

A solemn yet deeply empathic bildungsroman ... The vignettes don’t have a lot of momentum, but as a whole they render a sweeping view of a girl’s troubled coming-of-age with a solemnity that both wonders at and highlights the heartbreakingly persistent hope that lies at the core of Ruth’s life story. Manguso’s complex work will inspire reflection.