This disturbing, richly imagined novel will be hard to read at times not because of its style, which is formally ambitious but never pretentious or deliberately obscure. Rather the book may require frequent breaks because of its darkness, a kind of soul darkness that makes a reader see an old story–sexual abuse–anew. Of all the many articles, memoirs and novels I’ve read that deal with this issue, this is the book that captures its devastation most acutely, and from both the perpetrator’s and the victim’s perspective. A marvelous, if painful, achievement.
