Superb, incendiary ... There are numerous ways to characterize this superb novel. It’s a bildungsroman that explores the dynamics of power, ambition, and sexuality with the pulse and complexity of an intricate thriller, in exquisite prose. Each sentence is diamond cut ... Buntin has outdone herself ... leases and provokes from every vantage point, but what is especially remarkable is Buntin’s audacity, her gutsy choices, and her clarity. She’s pumping her fist in the air, and we can hear her roar.
Her gutsy, nuanced, and bravura take on the #MeToo novel remarkably portrays the queasy churn of our modern reckonings within one woman and the world at large, online and in life. As Will harnesses her own narrative, readers grasp along with her the audacity inherent in every story women tell about women, beginning with the idea they’re worth telling at all. Hers is a thrill to read and think about.
Buntin’s premise may be familiar, but the novel pays masterful attention to complexity, presenting events and relationships in all their strangeness and contradictions. Her language is superb; for all Will’s self-assuredness, the precarity of her situation, tied so inextricably to Nathaniel, is rendered in such exacting and heartrending detail as to make the reader’s teeth ache. The structure of the novel allows for heightened poignancy as Will reflects on the consequences of the choices she made over the years, as well as the ones she didn’t. A searing, brilliant novel about power, and stories, and who gets to tell them.
