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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Alex Heminsley
In the Fold is a delicate but insidious novel, that will leave you musing on your own choices long after the read is over.
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
Cusk's voice is so finely calibrated--so uproarious and devastatingly precise--that you're willing to forget for a while that things are bound to turn out badly. Her grasp of the vast intricacies of human relations has the cool equanimity of George Eliot, but the lens through which she views the world is pure Evelyn Waugh.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
It's a familiar tale of youth and disillusionment, but Cusk gives it contemporary crackle and some poignant new twists. [21 Oct 2005, p.81]
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Whitbread-winner Cusk (The Country Life, etc.) serves up crisp prose full of the unexpected pleasures of observation and metaphor. [1 Aug 2005, p.41]
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Favorable
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Village Voice Ed Park
In the Fold, Rachel Cusk's odd and unsettling new novel, is never quite what you think it is. Or rather, it doesn't become what you think it will, flirting with sturdy genres--haunted house, undergraduate nostalgia, comedy of manners--before blithely abandoning them, to thrilling effect.
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Favorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Karen Luscombe
Cusk, who was born in Canada to English parents, is a sensitive,
intelligent observer, and her unique perspective often startles with
latent familiarity. [17 Dec. 2005, p. D17]
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Ada Calhoun
"In the Fold" is at once a shimmering vision of privilege and a wise meditation on disillusionment.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Neel Mukherjee
In the Fold is an edgy conflation of the modern pastoral with the novel of psychological realism.
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Favorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Alex Clark
Despite its moments of high comedy and sometimes acute social observation... In the Fold is near enough relentless in its bleak vision of middle-class family life and of the damage inflicted by its perpetuation.
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Mixed
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London Review Of Books Christopher Tayler
Cusk's grammar nearly always checks out, her cluster-bomb metaphors are rarely mixed, and, even at its most extreme, her writing never degenerates into total nonsense. So it’s strange to see her choosing to write in such a wooden and inert manner.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Anna Shapiro
In the Fold seems have been written almost in panic, improvised out of sheer need for the next thing to happen, but never deeply imagined - as if each character were brought into being, set in motion and then became less accessible to the author than elaborations on setting or costume.
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Mixed
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The Independent Carol Birch
Cusk's creations are never trite. Everything is multi-layered: character, landscape, relationships. The effect is of a density which sometimes defies easy analysis.
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Mixed
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Booklist Marta Segal Block
There is a little too much explanatory writing, including a late, unnecessary chapter in which Michael essentially recounts the whole book for a conveniently visiting friend of his wife's. [1 Sep 2005, p.62]
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Unfavorable
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The New Republic Chloe Schama
With respect to the project Cusk explicitly claims as her own--displaying the modern, quotidian workings of a mind... the unlikeability of her characters makes her depiction simply hard to stomach and the effusive nature of her prose does not make her portrait any more palatable.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Lesley McDowell
Cusk wants to examine middle-class rise and fall in this novel... But that rise-and-fall somehow seems like a small story here, and no amount of overwrought sentences can make it any bigger.
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Unfavorable
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The Spectator Olivia Glazebrook
I really wanted to enjoy this book--it was longlisted for the Booker Prize--but there was just too little to love.
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