Fintan O'Toole described The Lesser Bohemians as having a simpler narrative voice than its predecessor, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, and that sentences "while still sometimes fragmented and discontinuous, come much closer to conventional structures and in consequence give themselves up much more easily.

"[2] Johanna Thomas-Corr of London Evening Standard reported on the style of the novel: "McBride has said that the techniques of method acting have informed the way she writes, breaking down a character’s experiences of the body and the mind and then finding a language that expresses them simultaneously.

In that sense, she really isn’t a control freak, unlike James Joyce, whose prose is a be-saved or be-damned baptism by total immersion.

The confidence and the capacity are as good as anyone’s, male or female, but (and I’m not going to attribute it to gender, though it’s something that might be discussed sometime) there’s an openness, an inclusivity, a distinct lack of God-almightyness, that makes reading her such a pleasure.

[6]Fintan O'Toole, writing for The Irish Times considered that The Lesser Bohemians was a "more hopeful" work than A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, and that "the central character seems, unlike her predecessor, fully capable of making her own life.

[2] Writing in the London Evening Standard, Thomas-Corr concluded that the novel "broke my heart several times over and on each occasion I had to stop to cry.