Verlyn Klinkenborg of the New York Times wrote that the novel contains three kinds of stories: "The first is a conventional, remote third-person account of plain facts, the events that can be reconstructed without conjecture, more or less. The second kind of story appears in several chapters called "Evidence": collections of quotations, excerpts from interviews and readings that bear on the Wade case. The third kind of story appears in chapters called "Hypothesis"; it tries to suggest what might have happened to Kathleen Wade in the days after she disappeared. But with these stories, Mr. O'Brien is also building a character, John Wade, whose inner architecture is more emblematic than personal."[1] He writes that this "is a novel about the moral effects of suppressing a true war story, of not even trying to make things present, a novel about the unforgivable uses of history, about what happens when you try to pretend that history no longer exists."[1]
Ellen Datlow praised the novel lavishly, saying "O'Brien continues to mine the Vietnam War and U.S. involvement in it for riches that he transmutes into art with his beautiful writing and interesting plot structure."[2]
