When she teases apart the structural underpinnings that prescribe gender, her analytical skills are breathtaking. When she lets those structures tumble and gives voice to the child raised in a spartan emotional wasteland, she broke my heart ... Moss goes back into a dark past to bring forth childhood memories. Setting that childhood voice free comes at a cost. A second voice, rendered in italics, constantly challenges her memories, berating her for making up stories. She alternates that vulnerability with her mature intellect, which sees that the literature she read to escape actually enforced British imperialism’s moral values of racial superiority, robust physical health and modest womanhood.
Full of daring. It is a complicated tale and her telling is many-sided, as full of devastation as it is wisdom ... A lesser writer would overdo these refrains. But Moss wears them lightly, subtly using the doubting voice and the heroic wolf to tangle preconceptions of reality as she forges her own way of writing memoir.
Extraordinary, clear-sighted ... There’s something beautifully wild and dangerous about this book ... A howl both exquisitely anguished and profound. It’s further proof that Moss is a towering figure in the contemporary literary landscape.