Publisher's Weekly Review
In his latest, Donohue (The Boy Who Drew Monsters) adeptly blends reality and fantasy. While temporarily living in Quebec with her husband, Theo, circus performer Kay Harpe longs for the wooden marionette she sees in the window of an abandoned toy shop, the Quatre Mains. Fleeing a lecherous coworker's advances one evening, Kay seeks refuge in the curiously unlocked shop and subsequently disappears. Left to conduct a desperate search for Kay on his own, Theo, a writer, must unravel the mystery with few leads to guide him. At the urging of his comrade Egon Picard, Theo's circus stage manager friend, Theo probes the vacant Quatre Mains for clues to Kay's disappearance, with unexpected results. As Kay falls in with a cast of oddball characters and learns to accept a life governed by perplexing fantasy world logic, Theo struggles to navigate a series of unusual situations that conspire to derail his search. Told from both Kay's and Theo's viewpoint, this narrative blurs the lines between the real and imaginary worlds. An inventive and suspenseful story told from an original perspective, Donahue's novel examines how refusing to embrace the present and struggling to escape unavoidable circumstances can alter one's life forever. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Love pulls everybodys strings.The Harpers are new to Quebec: Kay works for the cirque, and Theo works at home, translating a biography of Eadweard Muybridge from French to English. Their hazy summer in the Old City takes a horrifying turn when Kay, drawn each day to a puppet stores front window, is chased into the store late at night and, somehow, turned into a puppet. To Theo and the Quebec police, it seems she has disappeared, and in a way, she has: into the back room of the Quatre Mains, where she and the other puppets are only permitted to move from midnight to sunrise and where her humanity begins to fade away. Despite a lack of clues, Theo comes to believe he can find her and is willing to follow wherever the trail leadseven when it means believing his wife is no longer human. Unsurprisingly, a willingness to suspend disbelief is crucial to making it to the end of this story, and fans of Donohues earlier books (The Boy Who Drew Monsters, 2015, etc.) will enjoy this mixture of horror, magical realism, and mystery. The love story at the heart of the book keeps the two meandering storylines stitched together, though not gracefully. Devotees of Neil Gaiman and Steven Millhauser will appreciate Donohues willingness to get weird and to dig into ancient myth for inspiration; others may just be irritated.A standard tale of suspense in a beautifully unusual setting. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Donohue's masterpiece of psychological horror will change the way you look at puppets forever. Kay, an acrobat, and her husband, Theo, a French professor, are spending the summer in the old portion of Quebec City while Kay performs and Theo translates the biography of the pioneering photographer of motion, Eadweard Muybridge (whose macabre and intriguing real life adds wonderful depth to the story). One night, Kay walks home alone, frightened and disoriented, and stumbles across an old toy store. Here she is transformed into a puppet and held prisoner in the back of the shop, where all the puppets come alive between midnight and dawn. Theo, desperately searching for his vanished beloved, finds connections to the old toy shop but is having trouble believing the puppets may be alive; meanwhile, Kay is slowly forgetting the human world she came from and is embracing her life as a puppet with her new friends. Intricately plotted, absorbing, and suspenseful, this is a moving, modern story set in what feels like a fairy-tale world but is actually terrifyingly realistic. It is a tale of true love and the beauty of the mechanics of motion all wrapped up in one awesomely creep-tastic package. Give this to readers who loved Ellen Datlow's The Doll Collection (2015) as well as fans of Neil Gaiman, Steven Millhauser, or Elizabeth McCracken.--Spratford, Becky Copyright 2016 Booklist