a powerful mix of wrongdoing, sentiment and parody … Impactful with period detail filtered from contemporary records, Hallowed places of Exhilaration sees Atkinson on her best structure since the ordered trickeries of her Costa-winning sliding-entryways adventure Many lives (2013). A wonder of plate-turning story expertise, also a return in a period of I-focused autofiction, it utilizes in excess of twelve completely occupied characters to push a rompy scene that in any case focuses on the shaft chopping out mercilessness at the book’s heart: the traffic and double-dealing of young ladies whom ‘nobody would miss’, as somebody says, and who aren’t, as another person puts it, ‘the sort that a jury will accept’ … perkier than that multitude of past books: the subject is troubling, indeed, however Atkinson will not deny the potential for rushes and spills in the sordid goings-on of the interwar demimonde … A couple of songbirds really do feel strangely barbed…A piece of good times, certainly, however the joke feels like Atkinson punching down, since she, at the end of the day, pulls off precisely this accomplishment – except if her point is that it’s senseless to view Hallowed places of Jollity as such, in which case she’s criticizing the thankful peruser … Valid, the panoptic style exchanges secret for lightness, yet who needs tension when Atkinson can fell a vital person with only a thoughtless step into a bustling street? A mixing peak recovers the clever’s more horrible improvements by giving the all important focal point to a wrathful demonstration of fortitude by the reality, all-female posse the Forty Hoodlums. Wish satisfaction, perhaps, yet so profoundly has Atkinson tipsy from the historical backdrop of the period (as an afterword bears witness to) that you’re prepared to assume the best about her; one way or the other, you’re left thankful for the stuff change, even as the yearned for equity of young lady power just makes ready for the harsher equity of state power at its generally deadly. The marvel – as the noose fixes – is the flexibility that empowers Atkinson to segue from scenes of black as night loathsomeness to an energetic ‘what everybody did next’ coda without glossing over the story’s severe bit: it’s a max operation of consummate control.
RAVE
ANNA MUNDOW,
THE Money Road Diary
Places of worship of Joy spins around this soiled fight for control, but is — apparently in any event — Ms. Atkinson’s airiest creation to date. A plume light sugary treat of meeting dramatizations that reviews the prank comedies of P.G. Wodehouse, the novel has everything: an out of control youngster, a sleuthing ex-bookkeeper, a hounded Boss Overseer, even a reserve of purloined gems. There is the ideal equilibrium all through of pleasantness and grievousness … Also, as usual, there is the undeniable zing of Ms. Atkinson’s dry mind … t is difficult to consider another essayist who can bounce from obscurity to levity, frequently in a solitary sentence, without slipping by into hesitance or cynicism…Ms. Atkinson has culminated the comic wizardry that keeps us both airborne and drenched in her mosaic-like stories … in the event that such scenes verge on joke — similarly as a portion of the clever’s exchange goes toward archness — this just complements the fundamental murkiness. Yet again for here, with casual expertise, Ms. Atkinson has portrayed a world torn separated by war a city actually rising up out of the cover of ‘muted grieving.
RAVE
ELLEN AKINS,
THE STAR TRIBUNE
Superbly adjusted between the scholarly grit of books like A large number of lives and the more commonplace however adequate delights of her Jackson Brodie secrets, Kate Atkinson’s Sanctums of Mirth places a cast of powerful characters into an intriguingly tangled plot set in post-The Second Great War London, drifts a Shakespearean quality of prank charm over the procedures, and keeps you speculating till the end — even as something lets you know all that will be good. Generally … The story is a particularly perplexing snare of devious plotting and misleading that sometimes it’s difficult to tell who’s on a mission to get whom and what the game is, however this main makes it all considerably more tomfoolery … Atkinson’s story panache is some way or another verifiable — the brands and cable cars and flavors and names — and up to date, the narrating of now is the ideal time and our own, scenes unfurling just to bounce back and fill in according to another viewpoint, characters footnoting their own contemplations. Furthermore, frequently it’s downright entertaining, particularly in the bounds of the Coker family, who are whimsical in the most unsentimental way … This is narrating at its ideal — engaging, moving, amazing — as consistent with the occupied, Dickensian practice for what it’s worth to the exigencies of our day.
