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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
Perlman succeeds in illuminating the ambiguity inherent in lust, personal relationships, psychiatry, and the law by having each of his afflicted characters recount his or her version of the confounding betrayals, rapes, maladies, accidents, desperate measures, courtroom machinations, and deaths that transpire over the course of this smart and edgy novel. [1 Nov 2004, p.443]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Long enough to tell everything that needs to be told, but never ponderous and never overdone. George Eliot down under.
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Favorable
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Library Journal Marc Kloszewski
Despite its long-windedness and dangerous flirtation with cliche (e.g., the successful father who spoils his child but doesn't understand him), the novel works, and, for many readers, it will work in spades. [15 Oct 2004, p.55]
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Perlman doesn't fix his characters: Instead, he provides a shifting body of rich, ambiguous evidence that forces us to continually assess and reassess, much as we do in life.
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Barbara Fisher
A novel with just the right amount of meaning, intelligence, and beauty. [9 Jan 2005, p.F7]
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
The novel, as big and juicy as it is, may not offer sufficient closure.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Book Review Daphne Merkin
Be prepared to give it time. Be prepared to skim when you come to a particularly annoying digression. But most of all be prepared to stay with it for the long haul. It's worth it.
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Mixed
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Village Voice Jessica Winter
A big, bulky, irate book that, to borrow the parlance of the management consultant, might have been doubly effective at half the weight. Still, Seven Types of Ambiguity amply rewards as well as frustrates the indulgent reader's patience.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Jeff Turrentine
Like a sprinter in a marathon, he dazzles early on, deftly juggling ideas, characters and points-of-view. But by the time he crosses the finish line, his fatigue is apparent, and the reader is likely to share it.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Steven Poole
In this respect the novel delivers, with an outstanding final section, a triumph of the suspenseful withholding of information, and a note-perfect final page. All's well that ends well.
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Mixed
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The Independent Michael Bywater
[Perlman] should relax into his true strengths, and to hell with the allusions and the theory - because the people who care about that are not those who will read this humane, puzzling and often empathetic work.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times Thomas Meaney
But his book's gravest failing is that its architecture ultimately overwhelms its characters.
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Unfavorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Andrew Riemer
The impact of what might have been an incisive vision of our world is dissipated, however, by this novel's excessive length, by its structure and by the almost unrelieved uniformity of voice.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
[Perlman] circles endlessly around the same ideas, events and characters until the repetition becomes more exhausting than illuminating. And he offers long, legal-sounding interrogation sessions that deaden characters instead of bringing them to life.
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