Library Journal
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The setup in this elegant winner of a novel seems so obvious; aren't warning bells sounding for Nora Eldridge? A middle-aged Boston-area elementary school teacher and artist manque who cuttingly describes herself as "the woman upstairs"-someone who can be depended on to be dependable-Nora is enthralled when sweet, smart, charming Reza Shadid enters her class. His Lebanese-born father has left a post in Paris to teach in America for a year, while his Italian-born mother, the appropriately named Sirena, is an artist of some renown. Together, this worldly, glamorous family seduces Nora, with Sirena especially culpable. She talks Nora into sharing a studio with her, and soon Nora is opening to all the possibilities life has to offer-possibilities she thought were dead and gone forever. Verdict This quietly, tensely unfolding story is related in retrospect, so we know from the start that it has ended badly for Nora. The only question is how. Remarkably, Messud (The Emperor's Children) lets us experience Nora's betrayal as if it were our own, and what finally happens really is a punch in the stomach. Highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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It's not that elementary school teacher Nora Eldridge's life has gone particularly wrong, it's that it hasn't gone particularly right. She sold out her artistic dreams for success and stability, and become angry and full of self-loathing somewhere along the way. But when a young student, Reza Shahid, and his family enter her life, Nora finds herself changing as she is drawn into the Shahids' world. Cassadra Campbell's narration is pitch-perfect. She shifts back and forth between the different characters, lending all of them unique voices that capture their complexity. Her first-person narration is a delightful blend of restraint and emotion that will keeps listeners slightly anxious at all the right moments. By striking this balance, she captures the hard edge of Nora-and of the text-in a way that will resonate with listeners. A Knopf hardcover. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

*Starred Review* In this acid bath of a novel, the superlative Messud (The Emperor's Children, 2006) immolates an iconic figure the good, quiet, self-sacrificing woman with exhilarating velocity, fury, and wit while taking on the vicissitudes of family life and the paradoxes of art. Nora, our archly funny, venomous, and raging 42-year-old narrator, recounts her thirty-seventh year, when she was living alone and teaching third grade in Boston after the death of her profoundly frustrated mother. Nora longs to make art but hasn't mustered the necessary conviction. Enter the Paris-based Shahids. Reza, her new student, is a magnet for bullies stirred up by post-9/11 xenophobia. His Palestinian Lebanese father, Skandar, is a prominent academic spending a year at Harvard. His Italian mother, Sirena, is an artist in need of a studio and a studio mate. She promptly recruits Nora. A confident and passionate conduit for mythological powers, Sirena creates lush gardens and jungles made out of household items and refuse. Unworldly and lonely Nora, a veritable daughter of Ibsen, builds dollhouses small, painstakingly accurate replicas of the rooms occupied by women artists ranging from Emily Dickinson to Edie Sedgwick. Messud's scorching social anatomy, red-hot psychology, galvanizing story, and incandescent language make for an all-circuits-firing novel about enthrallment, ambition, envy, and betrayal. A tour de force portraying a no longer invisible or silent woman upstairs. --Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A self-described "good girl" lifts her mask in Messud's scarifying new novel (The Emperor's Children, 2006, etc.). "How angry am I?" Nora Eldridge rhetorically asks in her opening sentence. "You don't want to know." But she tells us anyway. Nora is furious with her dead mother, her elderly father and her estranged brother, none of whom seem to have done anything very terrible. Basically, Nora is furious with herself: for failing to commit to being an artist, for settling for life as a third-grade teacher in Cambridge, Mass., for lacking the guts even to be openly enraged. Instead, she is the woman upstairs, "whose trash is always tidy, who smiles brightly in the stairwell." So when the exotic Shahid family enters her life in the fall of 2004, Nora sees them as saviors. Reza is in her class; after another student attacks and calls the half-Lebanese boy "a terrorist," she meets his Italian mother, Sirena, the kind of bold, assertive artist Nora longs to be. They wind up sharing a studio, and Nora eventually neglects her own work to help Sirena with a vast installation called Wonderland. She's also drawn to Skandar, an academic whose one-year fellowship has brought his family to Cambridge from Paris. "So you're in love with Sirena, and you want to fuck her husband and steal her child," comments Nora's friend Didi after she confesses her intense feelings. It's nowhere near that simple, as the story unfolds to reveal Sirena as something of a user--and perhaps Skandar too, though it's unwise to credit Nora's jaundiced perceptions. Her untrustworthy, embittered narration, deliberately set up as a feminine counterpoint to the rantings of Dostoevsky's Underground Man, is an astonishing feat of creative imagination: at once self-lacerating and self-pitying, containing enough truth to induce squirms. Messud persuasively plunges us into the tortured psyche of a conflicted soul whose defiant closing assertion inspires little confidence that Nora can actually change her ways. Brilliant and terrifying.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Library Journal
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Messud (The Emperor's Children) returns with another intimate and piercing novel. Nora Eldridge, an elementary schoolteacher, once dreamed of being an artist but put aside her own dreams and ambitions to care for others. Her life takes an unexpected turn when the cosmopolitan Shahid family moves in from Paris. Nora is fiercely drawn to their son, a student in her class; his mother, an accomplished artist; and his dashing father, about whom she can't help fantasizing. Nora tries to get as involved in their lives as she can, until she ultimately realizes the cost of living vicariously through others. Cassandra Campbell does a beautiful job of narrating Nora's inner struggles. The listener easily gets lost in the beauty of her voice and the conviction of her efforts. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of literary fiction and taut drama. ["This quietly, tensely unfolding story is related in retrospect, so we know from the start that it has ended badly for Nora. The only question is how. Remarkably, Messud...lets us experience Nora's betrayal as if it were our own, and what finally happens really is a punch in the stomach," read the review of the Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 4/26/13.-Ed.]-Erin Cataldi, Franklin Coll., IN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly
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The gifted Messud, writing her way through the ages, has now arrived at a woman in her 40s-and it's not pretty. Nora Eldridge, a schoolteacher who dreams of being an artist, is angry, cynical, and quietly desperate. Then she meets the Shahid family: Sirena, Skandar, and Reza, a student in Nora's third-grade class at Appleton Elementary in Cambridge, Mass. When Sirena asks Nora to share an artists' studio, Nora falls in love with each exotic Shahid in turn: Sirena, for her artistic vision; Skandar, for his intellectual fervor; and Reza, because he's a perfectly beautiful child, bullied at school but magnanimous. In her previous books, Messud (The Emperor's Children) has set individuals against the weight of kin; here is an individual who believes she's found a vigorous self in the orbit of a dangerously charismatic family. But after freeing Nora from herself, the Shahids betray her, Sirena especially, cruelly exploiting a private moment of Nora's newfound joy with an intimate work of art Sirena shows in Paris without Nora's knowledge. As with other Messud characters, these too are hard to love; few would want to know the unpalatable Nora, so full of self-loathing, nor the self-important Shahids. Agent: Georges and Anne Borchardt, the Borchardt Agency. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.