Darkly comic, searing ... Greenwood’s graphic details are vivid and disturbing ... Greenwood’s stinging, salient novel remains relevant (the more things change, the more they stay the same), excoriating those who make a business of war whether it’s public or personal ... Provocative.
A caustic study ... The title of the book is testament to its wry tone, and ultimately its position ... Occasionally, Greenwood’s creative writing feels less successful than the news writing within it: the protagonist’s filed copy is sometimes clearer than the prose itself. But Vulture remains a remarkably skilful debut. Greenwood’s style is compelling and blackly comic; the story could not be more serious.
[Filled with] mordant humor and breathtaking immediacy ... Greenwood deftly portrays Byrne’s downward spiral, though some of her touches don’t quite work ... A tad heavy-handed ... The devastating consequences of Byrne’s recklessness foreshadow the apocalypse unfolding in contemporary Gaza.
Bawdy ... Its shocking conclusion indicting all those who exploit human tragedies for personal gain, Vulture is a scathing satirical novel set in the troubled Middle East.
To intercut horror with humour is a tough brief (Evelyn Waugh would have put it better), but Greenwood manages it without trivialising her subject ... The chapters revisiting the affair that broke her heart have a Bridget Jones vibe, but it evaporates once the narrative returns to Gaza, where Sarah, watching the conflict unfold, begins to put her life into perspective.
Merciless ... This sobering, blackly humorous and acutely observed book is based on events more than a decade ago. The depressing thing is that nothing much has changed.
War makes tragedy commonplace, but this can get a little grating. Dark comedy in a warzone is a rich field ... The scenes with foreign journalists and Palestinians are witty and sharply drawn, but I found myself bored by Sara, who over the course of the book seemed to get worse. There’s something tiring about the fundamental conceit of Vulture: look at this terrible person, doing terrible things, in a terrible place.
Greenwood’s depictions of the media industry are painfully funny, and familiar to anyone who has covered news abroad ... Sometimes stretches credulity: Despite occasional flashbacks to an unpleasant father and an emotionally abusive ex, it’s not clear why Sara is as broken or destructive as she is ... The book succeeds more as a story about a damaged industry: Greenwood is at her best when she’s skewering the media ... But the second half of the novel is so bleak that one finishes reading it with an ambiguous feeling. The incisive, albeit dark humor of the first half gets overrun by ever-greater cynicism ... What starts out as a satirical critique gives way to a scorched-earth assault.
The book does not breathe much, nor is it meant to ... Greenwood has achieved the sense of the uncontainable, indescribable and eventually irrational as it wrestles and throws Sara’s professionalism and sanity. The critical view of western media is thankfully not over-explained, the author having trusted the title to do its work, so the story continues its hectic movement, and while the flashbacks threaten to explain away Sara’s problems, they never quite do, and they remain in parallel as views of her life before all this violence, remarkably and strangely the same life ... Something very sad precedes the tragedies of the story, which is why, though she vaguely recognizes them as such, they have no cathartic shape and no teaching value. Vulture is a cruel story. It may also be a cruel book.
Often-compelling ... Full of dramatic set pieces, variously haunting and amusing, though the first-person narration tends to work against them. The endless I never entirely feels right for the circumstances, leading one to muse that in the last chapter it’ll be revealed that this whole time Sara actually has been on a couch in a well-appointed office trying to impress her handsome psychiatrist ... The novel ultimately is only about Sara.
