The book opens with an audacious and instantly gripping start ... Madden’s prose is sensuous without indulgence ... Dialogue appears without quotation marks, collapsing speech into thought. The effect is destabilizing and apt. In a novel where everyone is editing themselves — lying, omitting, reframing — language itself becomes porous ... Deeply satisfying.
The novel takes powerful and intentional advantage of what fiction can do that memoir can’t: give readers deep access to many viewpoints. Madden’s range in this regard is exceptional ... It’s a courageous and beautifully written novel that insists on the humanity of every last one of its characters—and entreats us to not look away from the full range and complexity of their experiences.
Neither a revenge story nor a moralizing one, this is an absorbing, energized novel of real-feeling characters attempting to live through incomprehensible violence and existential fury.
