In the Harvard Review, critic Robert Faggen praises the work as a "masterpiece of fine-hammered first person narrative.

She was following me because I was American and seemed so at home and she was looking for someone she could impose on for something. The main effort of arranging your life should be to progressively reduce the amount of time required to decently maintain yourself so that you can have all the time you want for reading.She ignores his rebuff and goes to Tsau—a decision that entails a six-day trek through the Kalahari Desert.

She is also in love with Nelson Denoon, a charismatic intellectual who runs an experimental women-only utopian village in the Kalahari. Whether Africa, in the 1980s, ought to pursue a capitalist or a socialist development model (the destruction of the Berlin Wall and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison are a decade away).Yes this novel was written by a male author, Norman Rush, in the 1st person as a female protagonist and it is an aloof one-directional love story at best. There is an intriguing psychological component, where questions arise as to the reason Nelson wants to remain in Tsau.

When our narrator - an anthropologist of supposedly Irish descent - declares that she knows Denoon to be an Irish name, I was taken aback. Listening to our attractive, scholarly lass lament over this dilemma, I hear a hint of Alison Poole's remark from Jay McInerney's novel Story of My Life: "Let's face it ladies, men are a bunch of dickheads but they're the only opposite sex we've got.His protagonist is a memorable female character: a continually shifting prism that revolves from dashing to needy, from witty to morose. And all of it is filtered through the unnamed narrators endlessly inquisitive musings, doubts and second thoughts. She criticizes the book for having "too much detailed sociology," but "in the main readers will be captivated by the narrator's quirky, obsessive voice and the situation she describes: a game of amorous relationships complicated by feminist doctrine and an exotic locale.

Weeks recommends that "those who want to read a utopian novel by and for Africa, by an African might want to seek out Season of Anomy [by Wole Soyinka]. I had been advised by people like the lion man to keep my consciousness in my superfices, my skin and eyes and ears, my legs, to be a scanning mechanism and nothing else while I was in the desert.From my own experience, when I encounter such combative, talkative people, my tendency is to quickly run in the other direction. Many are the opportunities we as readers are given to peer deeper into the character of both Nar and Denoon as they perform many phases of their mating dance (perhaps I should say mating ritual since we are in Africa). The anxiety she experiences camping at night, among lions and the numerous other wild animals that can kill you, was so deftly drawn.