[S]he shows with refreshing vividness how feelings of anger, betrayal and rage can simmer into something stranger and richer, somehow sadder and yet more joyful.

The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter.

The resulting confection, though fluent and amusingly written, forces the reader to suspend disbelief until every imaginative muscle burns with the effort. . . [a] tiresome and manipulative novel.

Toews steps over the camp and sentimentality of "Little Miss Sunshine" and displays a sharper sense of the grinding tragedy of mental illness. . . Toews is a genius at recording the everyday weirdness of young people, their capricious vacillation between screw-you sarcasm and tender pleading for affirmation.

The vernacular narrative, which had spark, specificity and rueful wit throughout the novel’s opening chapters, becomes sloppy and gabbling, like a blog hastily banged out. . . Finally, nothing about “The Flying Troutmans” feels authentic, not the characters and not their psychology, and certainly not the American landscape they blast through, leaving dust in the slipstream, but very little else.