PhilPaine.com

This is an extreme­ly imag­i­na­tive and well-writ­ten nov­el, pulling togeth­er sev­eral themes that would not nor­mally work well togeth­er. Doc­torow com­bines a real­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion of life in Toronto’s pleas­antly chaot­ic Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket neigh­bour­hood with night­mar­ish fan­tasy ele­ments that have the feel­ing of the grim­mer parts or Norse, Ger­man or Native Cana­dian folk­lore, and throws in a lit­tle cyber­punk, as well. These dis­parate com­po­nents are not set apart in blocks, but flow and blend into each oth­er on a para­graph-by-para­graph, some­times a sen­tence-by-sen­tence basis. I won’t sum­ma­rize the plot: it will just sound arbi­trar­ily grotesque, and will not give you any hint of the human­ity and the effec­tive lan­guage of the book. The book gives me some hope, because I was feel­ing that Sci­ence Fic­tion writ­ing in North Amer­ica was mori­bund, and this is an exam­ple of a return­ing vigour.