Fractious and darkly funny ... Against almost every indication I’ve given you so far, this ouroboros of ongoing traumas somehow manages not to be head-smashingly bleak. Steffie is one of those fictional creations you probably would and should run screaming from in real life, but on the page, she’s a pretty great hang: spiky, sharp-witted, blazingly self-aware ... Hughes has a canny, lyrical ear for her misfits and underdogs, and a touch tender enough to nudge their fate toward better things.
Disappointingly, as we dive into Steffie’s violent childhood in the 1970s and 1980s in the West Midlands, the dark comedy recedes. The jokes feel more detached, arising from her observations rather than her rowdy physicality. Hughes could have gone further and funnier to wring every last drop of absurdity from each scene, the last gasp of laughter through the tears. Where the author excels...is when she is meandering through the slippages of memory to reveal what is gnawing at her narrator ... It can’t escape the taint of disappointment.
