"The best novel of the year, in every page there's more wit and talent than in the whole contemporary Russian prose, everyone forgive me. Written with much physiology, humor, the novel is at times scaring, always fascinating and precise from a playwright's perspective." -Dmitry Bykov, the nationally-rewarded author of The Living Souls and The Evacuator

"The scope is epic - the world of Petrushevskaya has no division between important and secondary events, main characters and the rest; each character is measured in scale of fate, the light from cosmos flowing equally though everyone The new moment in this apotheosis of the "matriparchy" is that the great mother, the main hero in Petrushevskaya's fiction, includes this time both mothers and grandmothers who save other's children not only from death but also from the orphan-hood." -colta.ru

"It seems, they (Petrushevskaya's characters) appear strange to us only. Petrushevskaya as the author completely believes in the story that we read as a funny soap-opera-type nonesense. What is more - the author is ready to feel sorry for everyone involved in this roll of human passions. This very inexorable love and tenderness towards her characters has always brought up a suspicion about some author's secret knowledge." -syg.ma