"While women often are viewed as being the mature influence over Hornby’s reckless aging youths, Anne is as endearingly screwed-up as the males, if more aware of this fact. Anne is tired of reliving the past, hoping that “there had to be a present tense, somewhere,” and her tentative yearnings for a way into the now and away from the then give Hornby’s tale its true narrative drive. As well, Tucker's emergence as an actual character, and not simply an object of adoration, pushes the novel in new directions for Hornby, and lends hope that novel might become the British equivalent of Whale Music, Paul Quarrington's wonderful Canadian novel about a Brian Wilson-like recluse."

Read the rest of the review here.