The House at the Edge of Night is a family saga that demonstrates that ideas don't have to be new to be good ... The novel does not suffer from the fact that it uses familiar building blocks, or the fact that the inner lives of characters mostly stay there. Instead, it has the gnomic and suggestive simplicity of a folktale, koanic rhythms that let you fill in whatever complexity you can into the elisions ... this book is sweet and heady with nostalgia; not radical, maybe, but comforting as a quilt.
...brims with heart, dreamy folk tales and beautifully written passages about the people who call the island home ... Banner fills her pages with love, heartbreak, loss, grudges, forgiveness and redemption ... a perfect summer read, made for those balmy evenings on your porch with a glass of wine.
...written with the kind of old-fashioned craftsmanship and artisanal care that her characters would respect. It’s the kind of tale made for a week-long vacation ... combines the dream-like quality of a fairy tale with a multigenerational family saga. It is occasionally reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s folk tales and a less-fraught The House of the Spirits, by Isabel Allende.
