A steady oscillation between deliciously observed, ferociously strange fragments of consciousness and the social kabuki of the tragicomic teenage bildungsroman ... Invigorating and often hilarious ... When we’re really in Nicholas’s mind, we never want to leave ... Thrilling ... Don’t expect much in the way of big narrative twists ... The juice here is watching Clune’s little cyclones of thought ... Like a great painter, Clune can show us the mind, the world, with just a few well-placed verbs.
Clune doesn’t choose between what we might describe as the poetic and the novelistic, the mystic and the naturalistic ... When it comes to time and consciousness, Clune’s perennial topics, visionary perception is perhaps just a deeper form of realism.
[A] strange, idiosyncratic beauty ... A testament to the novel’s powers of enchantment; it seduces you into thinking like a child again ... Clune has achieved a remarkable sleight of genre, threading realism’s dull needle with a semi-magical thread.
