Stunning ... A collection of compelling essays exploring tangled mother-daughter relationships. As with the proverbial Chinese finger puzzle, the more her subjects pull away, the tighter the trap becomes ... Each chapter demonstrates Aviv’s exhaustive reporting and impressive intimacy with her sources ... Only one, albeit moving, piece on undocumented Filipino domestic workers feels like it doesn’t quite belong ... Together the pieces in this piercing collection shed light on how the bond between mothers and daughters can alchemize, through trauma, into something inescapable.
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Aviv’s journalistic method leans on the idea of unreliable narration ... All the shifts in time and point of view — and the lingering over details, both telling and not — have a downside. These reported essays can feel self-indulgent, slow and overlong ... Individually, these stories aren’t fully satisfying, but perhaps they aren’t meant to be. As the collection makes clear, Aviv prefers restless questioning to closure or complacency.
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Aviv’s writing also defies a fixed point of view. She moves effortlessly between reporting on events in one moment and entering the inner lives of her subjects the next, as though you were reading a short story told in the third person ... No one who reads Aviv’s book will ever read Alice Munro in the same way again, but they may read her, as I did, with a strange new curiosity.
