"The Laughing Place" is the antithesis of Chick Lit bestsellers and their smart, piercing wit. It goes deep into painful places and pulls at them like an insistent fingernail at a scab. Durban prods gently at the most cherished human foibles – pride, vanity, grief, and betrayal. She doesn’t laugh so much as look sympathetically on while we squirm at being found out, and I’m not sure if that’s better or worse. It moves slowly and with warmth, deceptively calm as quicksand. It is full of ugly truths in clothed in beautiful words, which although a welcome relief from the glaring directness of harsh reality, is no less uncomfortable when taken in and swallowed. It is probably more dangerous for that very reason.
Putting aside the deeper lessons of The Laughing Place, it is at the least full of chokingly moving prose stripped of the annoying intellectual pretense I find in say, Barbara Kingsolver or Alice Sebold. Her voice is gentle, sympathetic, and refreshingly simple as it carries us on a journey of loss, endurance and eventual salvation. I didn’t want to keep reading, but found I could not put it down. ( )