A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut ...
Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page..
As the narrator\'s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known.
The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments--the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover.
Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience--from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows--rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.
A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. - O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-louise Bennett\'s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. - New York Times Book Review Dazzling...exquisitely written and daring .
It]reminds us that small things have great depths. ...
Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent.
A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut ..
