Practice
one of those surprise charmers that initially appears to be microscopically focused yet encompasses its main character’s startlingly intimate, wide-ranging thoughts and feelings—both scholarly and libidinous—about life, love, literature, solitude, self-discipline, physical and intellectual appetites, and more. And it offers a delightfully original take on an age-old philosophical conundrum, the mind-body problem ... Brown’s novel contains a kingdom in its pages, probing nothing less than a reader’s relationship with a text and how to satisfyingly reconcile one’s mind and body.
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There’s a genius in the idea of using Shakespeare’s sonnets, which form an exploration of desire deeply and messily concerned with questions of gender and selfhood, to illustrate the complicated process of a young woman figuring out who and what she is ... One of the joys of Brown’s writing, which is often lovely even if it sometimes labors to surprise, is how lightly she lets readers make thematic connections ... Brown appeals specifically to those who have found themselves shaping their own identities around the words of others, and then coming to wonder whether that process has honed their individuality or lessened it.
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It works because it doesn’t try to be a bigger story than it is and because it’s concise ... It also works because Brown herself is such a vivid writer ... A refreshing midsummer’s break from the sweeping, socially engaged fiction that understandably dominates our own anxious time. It’s an unapologetically small, inward-looking and, yes, privileged story.
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