Involving ... The book’s success in drawing together its threads is mixed... but it is easily most alive and nuanced when Freudenberger is writing about contemporary New York parenting, the impossible task of raising a teenager with quicksilver moods, the sheer physical exhaustion of it all ... To her vast credit, Freudenberger has a brain and a conscience, and it’s clear that she is trying to simultaneously scrutinize her experiences as a particular kind of parent in New York and tie them to a larger world.
Engaging ... The Limits is insightful about the ways the Covid crisis applied pressure to unsteady joints, as if testing which bonds would last ... By allowing readers to see these people from different angles, the author points up how rare it is to truly know ourselves and others. Yet the shifts can also be disorienting. Who is at the center of this book? In tying up the various yarns, Ms. Freudenberger dwells unexpectedly on some storylines and breezes past others.
The story’s structure reveals and amplifies these limits to knowledge, empathy, and imagination by generating a pervasive dramatic irony ... The mystery aspect of the plot, which revolves around Pia and Raffi, isn’t especially interesting and the reveal feels anticlimactic. These flaws and limitations notwithstanding, The Limits is a worthy novel with much to recommend it.
