ALA Booklist

The emotional consequences of ongoing incest between a boy, 17-year-old Jacky, and his younger sister, Bee, is the harrowing subject Coman deals with in this unsettling book, which some will feel reads more like a short story aimed at adults than a fully developed YA novel. It is not the first dip into this controversial territory: Sonia Hartnett gave us Sleeping Dogs (1995), a bleak but beautifully written story about a family twisted in a miserable net of their own making. This is a more hopeful book, rooted in familiar images of children's physical play. The plot revolves around the teenagers: when their father is injured in Vietnam and their mother is off nursing him, they find solace in innocent play that eventually becomes sexual in nature. But the story is not presented in a straightforward manner. It is saturated with religious and sexual symbolism, and it veers from gritty family dynamics played out around the dinner table to a self-conscious foray into magic realism that depicts Bee's tortured self-redemption. At the same time, it proves Coman's extraordinary talent for creating complex images with simple words and her remarkable ability to elicit sympathy for all the characters--even Jacky, vicious and angry on the one hand, yet clearly horrified at what he's done to his vulnerable sister. Coman's most stunning scene, in fact, shows Jacky broken and sobbing after he's tried to force Bee to have sex. Taken altogether, this is a fierce, intriguing novel, not easily forgotten; it is also an extremely convoluted story that many readers (including adults) will find easy to read but difficult to grasp. (Reviewed October 1, 1998)

Horn Book

When their parents go away for a weekend, siblings Jacky and Bee find themselves reenacting an old childhood game now charged with sexuality, trying to reverse the sadness that came to the family when their father returned physically and psychically damaged from Vietnam. There's story enough in their tortured histories, but Coman's elaborate metaphorical structures topple this short novel.

Kirkus Reviews

Coman (What Jamie Saw, 1995, etc.) takes on another taboo in this hallucinatory tale of a profoundly injured family. Bee Cooney, 13, and her impossibly sullen, mutinous brother Jacky, 17, are alone in the house while their parents are away for the weekend. When Jacky comes into her room at night, he starts "moving on top of her, rocking against her, back and then forward," and Bee suddenly remembers that he used to do the same years before, whenever they re-enacted the Vietnam ambush that left their father permanently impaired. With a series of visions and symbolic events, Coman creates a vivid sense of the pressure that suppressed guilt can exert: a bull appears in the Cooneys' backyard; Bee sees Jacky savaged by a bear, and after trying to comfort him (in a scene that may or may not be a sexual consummation) finds gruesome wounds on her own body; finally she's enveloped in flames that leave her whole and at peace. With clearer vision, Bee sees, and makes readers see too, that Jacky is no monster, just a soul tortured by fear—probably of the future, certainly of himself. It all seems fraught with meaning of an elusive sort; after Bee's epiphany, "the world had changed even though everything in it looked the same, and she had no words for the things she had seen." Readers may find the story's ambiguities creepy, and impossible to decipher, but they have an irreversible impact and, for good or bad, leave a lasting impression. (Fiction. 13+)

Publishers Weekly (Fri Oct 06 00:00:00 CDT 2023)

Coman's (What Jamie Saw) latest is the literary equivalent of a Diane Arbus photograph: it presents a sharp, shocking picture of pathology, but leaves it to the audience to imagine the world beyond the frame. Bee is 13 and her brother, Jacky, is 17. Their parents--an ineffectual mother and a father damaged both physically and mentally from serving in Vietnam--go visit the father's parents over Labor Day weekend, and Jacky and Bee are left alone. Jacky rapes a complicit Bee, who suddenly recalls years of similar molestation, evolving from their imaginary reenactments of their father's wartime exploits. As the weekend progresses, Bee begins to dissociate. She hallucinates; subconsciously or otherwise, she makes an overture to Jacky; she wanders outside naked. Coman's prose is as trenchant as ever, but she doesn't give readers much to go on. Bee's descent occurs so rapidly and violently that the impact verges on the sensationalistic. In both scope and length, the work seems closer to a short story than a novel. Like the subjects of Arbus photos, Bee and Jacky remain Other, figures to gape at but whose experience creates a gulf between them and the reader. Ages 12-up. (Oct.)

School Library Journal

Gr 9 Up-This brilliantly written novel centers around a critical weekend in the lives of a brother and sister who have an incestuous relationship. Bee Cooney, 13, is very much aware of the increasing strain that has developed between her 17-year-old brother Jacky and their disabled Vietnam veteran father and anxious, unassertive mother. Bee feels distanced from Jacky, too, and longs to show him that she is on his side. Events come to a head when he refuses to accompany the family to his grandparents' home in the next state. Bee remembers the woods behind her grandparents' house, where they lived for three years after their father came home wounded, as the setting for a war game the two children played-a game that culminated in mutual masturbation. After Bee's parents acquiesce to Jacky's plan to stay home, Bee faints and is allowed to stay with him. That night their physical relationship is resumed. Through the course of the weekend, Bee suffers hallucinations of a bear attacking her brother and of her body burning. Jacky finds her standing naked in their yard and treats her with tender solicitousness. Having passed through the worst of the crisis, Bee reaches a new understanding of the fear and anger her family has harbored. She can acknowledge Jacky's need to break away and reaches out to their nearly shattered father. This is neither an easy book to read nor does it suggest any neat resolutions. What Coman does offer, masterfully, is honesty, compassion, and even a glimmer of hope.-Miriam Lang Budin, Mt. Kisco Public Library, NY