[2] Writing in The Australian Book Review, Laura Elizabeth Woollett wrote: "Although shifts in setting and perspective are handled gracefully, a level of trust in the author is a prerequisite, as the thrust of the narrative is not always clear.
One of the starkest transitions – which takes the reader from the action in the mountains to a cold seaport where a girl learns the ancient art of harvesting squid ink – is also revelatory, its significance rippling outward to inform the wider narrative...[the novel's] environmental concerns, paired with its allegorical quality, could be didactic in less assured hands.
By privileging the laws of his fictional universe without reference to contemporary debates, Arnott weaves a narrative that feels both timely and timelessly engaging.
"[3] Ellie Robins in the Los Angeles Review of Books noted that there are a number of "arresting visuals in a novel whose mode of narrative propulsion is to move from one striking image to the next.
This is the visuality of myth, in which images are important not for their beauty or grandeur but for their resonance, their power to encapsulate deep truths more fully and potently than any amount of exposition ever could."