Review by Booklist Review
Williams explores human depravity and the will to survive in this grim and strange, but utterly unique, literary and gothic debut. After an apocalyptic event wipes out most living creatures and poisons who and what remains, a woman attempts a new society with her brother and their offspring. The woman promised her many children that there are other survivors. To prove it, she leaves one of her daughters in the woods to be married into another survivor camp. But when the daughter returns after meeting no one, the children begin to doubt their mother's vision, and the loose threads keeping the family together start to unravel in violent and chilling spasms. The novel dips in and out of several characters' perspectives, melding the children's strange images, visions, and dreams with the adult characters' past memories, present regrets, and future fears. The effect is unsettling and adds to the novel's dark atmosphere. The novel also examines women's particular vulnerability in society through the young brothers' violence, both sexual and nonsexual, toward their sisters. This is a gripping look at humanity's treatment of women and questions whether human survival at all costs is worth it.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Williams debuts with a bizarre and strangely beautiful story of an incestuous family surviving in a postapocalyptic wasteland. A woman known as "the Matriarch" started a family with her brother. Jan, the oldest of their many children, made his own family with his sister Agathe. Dolores, the Matriarch's first daughter, described by the omniscient narrator as "fat," "stupid," and without legs, is resented by Agathe for her inability to help with the farming. After the Matriarch has a vision of another family who survived their ruined world, she sends Dolores away to be married. The younger siblings, meanwhile, resist the Matriarch's calls to procreate, and spend their time watching episodes of an old TV show called Get Aquinas in Here on VHS tapes, in which the medieval philosopher comments on various disturbing situations. One of the show's stories involves a girl who is admired by her community, but hated by her epileptic brother, whose seething grows into an incestuous lust. The dreamlike narrative can be hard to follow, but Williams's lyrical, visceral prose ("Dolores shuffled in her skin, as though she wanted to shuck it off") brilliantly sustains her nightmarish vision. This bold and demented effort is definitely a love-it-or-hate-it proposition, but those who like it will be really into it. Agent: John Ash, Pew Literary. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
DEBUT A climate disaster has wiped out civilization and poisoned the land. The Matriarch and her brother then tried to restart humanity on the edge of a ruined city, but now, two generations into an incestuously created family, things are looking worse, not better. Hoping to connect with other survivors, the Matriarch sends away her unspeaking legless daughter Dolores as a marriage offering. However, after Dolores rolls herself back home, all semblance of order begins to unravel, except for the constant in their lives--an old TV show, Get Aquinas in Here, in which the medieval saint faces ethical dilemmas. Williams's disquieting survival novel is meant to evoke a visceral, uncomfortable reaction in readers, enhanced by the eerily detached omniscient narration that reveals intimate and depraved details, and an uneasy layout of long, unbroken paragraphs. Nods to human storytelling traditions--from the Old Testament to Greek epics to Shakespeare--anchor this shocking tale set in a terrifyingly possible near future. VERDICT While not for everyone, this odd, deeply unsettling story will have readers vacillating between overwhelming disgust and an inability to stop thinking about what it all means. Fans of critically acclaimed macabre tales (like Rachel Eve Moulton's Tinfoil Butterfly and Maryse Meijer's The Seventh Mansion) will find a kindred spirit here.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A grim meditation on the purpose of survival. In the opening scene of Williams' debut novel, youngest child Agathe watches as her father, who is also her uncle, wheels her older sister--the languageless, legless Dolores--into the forest, where he will leave her as a fertility offering to a perhaps apocryphal group their mother believes lives on the other side of ruined Prague. Agathe thinks that Dolores has been chosen for this abandonment due to "the blunt promise of her anatomy: the slack mouth and the round pig eyes; the antiquated languor of her fat white hands." The cruelty of these perceptions herald the tone used throughout toward the book's characters, who scrabble to survive in the aftermath of a holocaust which left the Matriarch and her brother as the only viable survivors. Rather than give in to the lethargy of despair, the Matriarch set herself the task of repopulating the denuded Earth, but though the family does survive and even thrive after a fashion, the lack of diversity in the gene pool has a predictable effect. When Dolores crawls back from the forest alone, neither bride nor sacrifice, the Matriarch's uncharacteristic fallibility destabilizes the precarious balance between the older generation and the younger children who, in their violent strangeness, seem the true inheritors of this new Earth. Williams compiles her images in breathless, smothering drifts that mimic both the oppressive landscape and the gauzy unreliability of the main characters' perceptions with virtuosic intensity. But while Williams' linguistic project is akin to the early work of Cormac McCarthy, who mines similar themes with a similar sense of claustrophobic animality, her more absurdist touches (including a TV show featuring Thomas Aquinas and stories within the story that echo both pop culture and the Arabian Nights) guide the novel. This is unfortunate in a book that insists so fervently on the fetishization of its main characters' disabilities. The result shifts an already deeply challenging book from a meditation on cruelty to an enactment of the same cruelty Williams set out with the intent to explore, but not, the reader has to believe, to indulge. This novel awes on the sentence level but ultimately bludgeons the reader with the brutality of its larger vision. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
