A Newsweek Favorite Book of 2014
“Savage’s is a book of the heart as much as the head. Which is itself an accomplishment of no small note: to recognize the arbitrary, degraded thing that is memory, and allow it its loveliness for all of that.”
—The New York Times Sunday Book Review
“Savage’s lean, meditative novels, so meticulously pitched and poised, eschew the bloated excess and garish dazzle that can mar those from writers half his age.”
—The Star Tribune
“To call the book a novel, however, fails to acknowledge the poetry in its form.”
—Carolina Quarterly
“A small book that tells a huge story.”
—Shelf Awareness
“The narrative perfectly replicates the capriciousness of memory.”
—AskMen.com
“A novel written in a most unusual way: a series of brief paragraphs which sometimes read like diary entries, other times like descriptions from a book of recollections. The mosaic effect is enhanced by the author’s skillful use of language, his vivid, poetically-charged prose style.”
—Lively Arts
“[Savage's] elegant laconism, his leaps across the self-evident, his soft aplomb, and the rarified air he bestows upon the mundane make him the only American writer worthy of the label the true eccentric.”
—Valeria Luiselli
“Savage writes knowingly about the uncertainties of childhood memory, but creates a convincing world of sibling combat and adult pretension. A wonderful, absorbing novel.”
—C. Michael Curtis, Fiction Editor, The Atlantic Monthly
“A beautiful portrait of a woman who attempts to recreate what she has left by meditating on images.”
—Online Sundries
“There’s a vividness to these false memories; even those scraps battered ‘beyond recognition’ shine with a light of their own.”
—Wisconsin State Journal
