The Candy House

ANNALISA QUINN, NPR

"Mandala's inventions feel especially poignant in Egan's fictional worlds, which are so densely populated by addicts and alcoholics. These are people who don't own their pasts, in either the sense of literally remembering them, or in the sense of feeling any agency in the events of their lives. So often her characters are unable to understand or accept what happened, those crucial, ill-understood moments when everything went awry. Far from being cartoonishly evil, an obvious wrong, Own Your Unconscious has deep instinctive appeal. This is characteristic of Egan, who isn't interested in moral problems with obvious answers ... there is a persistent, lovely countermelody to the corporate project of mapping human experience and using it to predict what people will think and buy. The novel is full of people engaged in a kind of sweeter and more plaintive human algebra."