Irish Independent
"A lovely book."
Booklist
"Insightful…perceptively drawn…poignant, evocative and meant to be savored."
Boston Globe
"Subtle and satisfying...a brilliant collection."
The New Yorker
"Witty and topical…a fresh and compassionate portrait."
Entertainment Weekly
"Cusk has a gift for articulating fluid, unsettling emotions just beneath the surface of consciousness."
People
“[Cusk’s] intelligence and emotional honesty give a sense of having experienced, rather than read, this book…extraordinary.”
Marie Claire (UK)
"Impressively written."
Independent on Sunday
"Sharp observation of character, vivid imagistic descriptions."
Independent Magazine
"You want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch."
Daily Mail (London)
"If great fiction puts into words something about ourselves that we didn’t know we knew, this is it."
People Magazine
"[Cusk’s] intelligence and emotional honesty give a sense of having experienced, rather than read, this book…extraordinary."
Entertainment Weekly
“Cusk has a gift for articulating fluid, unsettling emotions just beneath the surface of consciousness.”
Booklist
“Insightful…perceptively drawn…poignant, evocative and meant to be savored.”
The New Yorker
“Witty and topical…a fresh and compassionate portrait.”
Boston Globe
“Subtle and satisfying...a brilliant collection.”
Independent on Sunday
“Sharp observation of character, vivid imagistic descriptions.”
Independent Magazine
“You want to gasp with the shock of recognition at a rarely articulated thought delivered with a visceral punch.”
Daily Mail (London)
“If great fiction puts into words something about ourselves that we didn’t know we knew, this is it.”
Irish Independent
“A lovely book.”
Marie Claire (UK)
“Impressively written.”
The New Yorker
The women in these five linked vignettes are all connected to a journalist named Serena Porter, either personally or as readers of the weekly column she writes about her family life. While they struggle to understand their painful and awkward responses to lovers and children, she spins the raw material of motherhood and marriage into witty and topical dispatches. Of course, much of what Serena writes is factitious, both in its details (she freely appropriates an acquaintance’s experience as her own) and in the breezy complacency that it projects; Cusk seems to suggest that our true thoughts about love and family defy articulation. Such is her gift for capturing women’s psychology and their sense of their place in the world that the novel achieves what Serena’s column cannot: a fresh and compassionate portrait of a generation’s feelings about motherhood.
Publishers Weekly
Billed as a novel of "overlapping relationships," Whitbread-winner Cusk's evocative latest, with its tenuously connected sections, feels more like a short story collection linked by theme and a few shared characters. Cusk (The Country Life; Saving Agnes) unites her tales via her characters' lonely, isolated conditions and the knotty relationships between parents and children-from Kristy, an imprisoned mother-to-be who gives birth in the back of a squad car in "Confinement," to Mrs. Daley, an unhappy, controlling woman whose need to establish herself as a victim trumps her ability to find or give happiness in "Mrs Daley's Daughter." Cusk's vision of contemporary relationships is a lonely, wintry one, in which people's inner landscapes dominate. This makes for gorgeous, languorous writing in places, but it also restricts the view: the landscapes are so rich with pathos that there isn't always enough room for the range of human emotion so essential to prose that relies on thought instead of action. In "The Sacrifices," a married woman who never had the baby she desired visits her childhood home, now occupied by strangers, and fantasizes about returning to her old room: "I would sit on my bed as the afternoon turned outside the window to night. I would wait for them to call me down." This passivity runs throughout the book, as characters tend toward rumination rather than deed. But as readers come to the end, the lives of Cusk's characters begin to tie together hauntingly. This is not life in all its messy complexity, but a mannered, poignant portrait of the treacheries of domestic life. (Mar. 2) Forecast: This is a rather slight offering from Cusk, but the solid U.S. readership she has built will snap it up. Inviting jacket art-a threadbare sofa and wallpaper-like print-won't hurt either. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
This novel is really a collection of tales tenuously linked by characters that share little beyond geographic proximity and the sometimes perplexing and vexing state of parenthood. It follows on the heels of Cusk's A Life's Work, an account of her own mixed feelings about motherhood. Here she offers a fictional exploration of mothers whose feelings of alienation toward their children seem to be rooted in the remote and abusive parenting they themselves suffered. They are also connected by the offstage presence of newspaper columnist Serena Porter, whose popular column about family life strikes a chord with her readers. Not surprisingly, when she finally appears in the flesh in the final chapter, she is another harried mother, dealing with two unruly young daughters and the tragedy of a dying husband. This is a witty, trenchant, and sometimes startling look at motherhood from the perspective of urbane, professional women who somehow can't quite cope. Libraries that collect quality fiction may wish to consider.-Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Kingston, Ont. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Five interconnected tales from Whitbread-winner Cusk (The Country Life, 1999, etc.), centered on the fraught bonds between parents and children. The currently fashionable tactic of unifying a short-story collection by loosely relating the characters can seem like a gimmick, but Cusk weaves her tapestry ever-tighter toward a climax that will send readers back to the earlier sections to marvel at the subtle artistry that has planted throughout seeds that bear full fruit only at the end. She begins, in the sardonically titled "Confinement," with a pregnant woman in an English jail, convicted of murder and faced with the prospect of losing her baby once she gives birth. The scene shifts in "The Way You Do It" to the Alps, where an ill-assorted group are on a skiing holiday that only underscores the ambivalence of the three characters who are new parents. "I mean, I love them and everything," says one, "but sometimes I think, God, whatever happened to our life?" The protagonist of "The Sacrifices," pressured by her previously married husband to forego having a child, realizes too late she's been psychologically abused by him as she was by her mother. The glancing connections among the characters only truly make sense in the superb two stories that close the collection: the terrifying "Mrs. Daley's Daughter," with its mordant view inside the head of a monstrous mother who always thinks she's the one being hurt; and the keening "Matters of Life and Death," in which an overwhelmed young woman whose husband wanted a stay-at-home wife and mother sees him turn around and say, "This family thing. Six years. Six years . . . I'm dying." A neighbor who writes a feminist newspaper column about raisingchildren and her dying husband, a crusading lawyer, provide the thematic link that ties it all together with an emotional wallop all the more devastating for being rendered in Cusk's quiet, understated prose, with its delicately detailed rendering of the ebb and flow of human thought and feeling. In particular, her portrait of mothers' deeply conflicted attitudes toward their young children perfectly captures the primal love and the despairing sense of total inadequacy in the face of their all-consuming demands. Absolutely brilliant, and deeply moving.
