The City has an unofficial curfew, encouraged by cryptic and ominous slogans by the government, where no one is safe out of their homes after 10 p.m.

Molly ends the show with a scene taken from real life where her father told her that eventually she would be alone, but that she would be strong enough to survive.

William Giraldi referred to it as "a spare masterwork of dystopian fiction, a fevered prose poem of society strangled by nefarious rule.

"[1] Sam Sacks, writing in The Wall Street Journal: "Mr. Ball does not embrace uncertainty to advance a literary theory but to suggest that the imagination can create truths to compete with what is unbearable about reality.

In previous books, the author—a poet with the mind of a cardsharp—has seemed giddy with his powers of invention, as his heroes (a mnemonist, a pamphleteer) scramble through labyrinths (a sanitarium for chronic liars, an inverted skyscraper plunging hundreds of feet underground).

In the Chicago Tribune, Alan Cheuse complimented the novel's ambitions but was ultimately disappointed: "Ball simply does not manage to wring from his material either the emotion or the delight most readers require to persevere in a work that tends much more toward allegory or mock-fairy tale than realism.