Helle captures with uncanny grace the relationship between an unnamed mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter following the former’s cancer diagnosis ... Helle’s capacity to make compelling fiction out of the most ordinary objects and events is partly a matter of tense ... Helle is masterful at giving us a laconic description of something that might well be darker ... A world of loss and lyricism.
It’s serious work, and precisely through being so ordinary, it becomes deeply affecting ... Gentle ... Aiken has a formidable task in conveying all this beautiful subtlety, but he manages. In particular, he captures perfectly the texture of Helle’s sentences, their lilting rhythm and slow focus.
