"Revealing any more of the plot will only spoil the pleasure of discovery, and there is so much to enjoy, not least the way Gaiman can take the mundane - a button, a duck pond - and build a textured world that evokes the universal, whether it be the unsettling image of a dressing gown hanging from a door or in making real the taste of fresh cream and warm porridge."
Sydney Morning Herald 

"Gaiman is at his fantasy-master best here."
Who Weekly, Australia

"Whatever the audience, it's one of Gaiman's most accessible works, a story that not just recognises the primal power of mythology but harnesses it to great effect."
Sun Herald, Sydney

"It's a beautiful and frightening fairy tale; it's also the master fantasist's most emotionally raw, personal novel to date."
Time Australia

"...there is also something rather more ambiguous at work in it, a sense the trauma that has so unsettled its narrator's life remains unresolved, and that the many gaps in the narrator's account are symptomatic of a more profound psychic dissonance. In the end it is this quality that lends this strange and deceptively simple novel its power."
Weekend Australian