New York Times Sunday Book Review, June 3, 2011:
Valentine’s novel has the stylized quality of books by Angela Carter like “The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman,” and it displays similar pyrotechnics. Run by a woman known as Boss, the traveling Circus Tresaulti ekes out its existence against a postapocalyptic backdrop of cities rebuilding after “the bombs and the radiation.” The setting is unimaginative, but the circus performers, most of them mechanically altered to enhance their acts, come to life in a series of skillful set pieces. Chief among these performers are the aerialists Alec, who has recently (and intentionally) fallen to his death, and Bird, who has replaced him. Together they give the novel its emotional force, as Valentine keeps returning to the reasons for Alec’s death: “For anyone who sees it, a moment like that is never in the past; it is always happening. . . . When Bird falls, Alec is falling.” In contrast to the complexity of that haunting echo, the plot is more basic, involving the threat from a dastardly “government man.” Yet in a highwire act of her own, Valentine still raises the novel above the ordinary through her ability to convey the richness of the circus performers’ emotional lives, coupled with impressive writing — as in a description of Alec’s surgically attached wings, every bone-and-brass feather “jigsawed and hammered and smoothed so thin that when it strikes another feather it rings out a clear note.”