Reception
According to Paul Kincaid, writing in Strange Horizons , the novel "read[s] like a crazy, quirky short story that got away from the author and grew way beyond its natural length ... a pretty good novella [that] has been bulked out artificially to qualify as a novel." Finding it "edgy and involving" at first, he feels it falters once Fintushel "makes it plain that everything is meant literally. From that moment on he has to load [on] more and more weirdness ... to keep the thing moving at the headlong rush he has established." Kincaid also finds the novel's Yiddish "bounce and rhythm, which "gives [Fintushel's] short stories their particular verve and character ... rather tiring" put in the mouth of the explicitly non-Jewish narrator. He deems the book's "remorseless" pace, "succession of determinedly quirky characters," and "one-pitch narrative voice" exhausting to the reader, while noting "there are enough set-piece scenes and sparkling passages of dialogue [to] remind you how good [the author] can be when fully in control of his material." [2]
The novel was also reviewed by Faren Miller in Locus no. 557, June 2007, and Peter Heck in Asimov's Science Fiction , December 2007. [1]
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