"This is the best novel on the fall list -- a historical saga spanning a century with compelling characters and poetic imagery.... the landscape encompasses feminine longing and fragility in Sweatman's deft hands. Her prose sweeps over the big prairie sky, lingering over the rolling hills, taking its time." --
Calgary Herald "
When Alice Lay Down With Peter is a galloping family epic that's reined in, but not tamed, by a wry humour. Sweatman teases us, with a wink and a nudge, into going along with her tall tales, and we do go along, because the details she gives root us compellingly in time and place. Sweatman is so obviously in love with the larger-than-life landscape of this novel that we can't help but fall in love along with her. This is a rollicking, erotic, magical read." -- Gail Anderson-Dargatz
"
When Alice Lay Down With Peter is an intricate love letter to the flood plain of southern Manitoba, a landscape that Margaret Sweatman convincingly crafts as the centre of the world. An uncommon family saga, it is also, at times, a riotously funny account of a radical, roistering and shocking prairie history. Margaret Sweatman's writing is both muscular and musical. In her richly layered evocations of worlds social, political, natural and supernatural, the reader can never slip into anything like complacency. This is a streaking comet of a novel and I really do think it's extraordinary." -- Bill Richardson
"Stark acts and facts of history are lovingly embroidered by Sweatman's gift for discription: winter days are 'as crisp and short and dark as an eighth note'; a stilted dinner consists of 'steamed curiosity and fried frustration.'
When Alice Lay Down With Peter is an exuberant, generous, magical retelling of Canadian history." --
Quill and Quire "Sweatman's style is loose and poetic. Her elliptical dance through history is reminiscent of Jane Urquhart's, in
The Whirlpool and Away. Novelists have often told us more about our shared past than historians: think Tolstoy, Dickens or Balzac. Overwhelmed by our vast geography, Canadian fiction writers have been slow to mine the rich bedrock of Canadian history. But writers such as Sweatman, Urquhart, Audrey Thomas and Fred Stenson are finally rescuing our past from the "boring" academic ghetto to which it was consigned. They bring it alive by presenting it as a shimmering tapestry of individual stories rather than a linear trudge through political and economic progress." -- Charlotte Gray,
National Post (September 29, 2001)
"
When Alice Lay Down With Peter is all over the historical and geographical map, an exuberant romp through history which...covers all bases and leaves no stone unturned. ...It is quite a journey, good-humoured, sad, eventful and originally conceived, a riotous excursion....Sweatman...is an original writer whose deft handling of history, although flamboyant, can be effective...her characters are well described.....Sweatman's tour through history is witty, humane and full of surprises, a lament for human folly and a salute to human resilience." --
London Free Press "This is the sort of book Larry McMurtry might write if he had a taller talent and deeper sensitivity....What a relief to find a novel of serious intent utilizing a narrative that really zips along." -- George Fetherling,
Vancouver Sun "Sweatman's writing graciously flows from generation to generation carrying with it the phrases and habits of ancestors. There are passages tinged with magic...Sweatman allows the landscape to come alive....[L]eaves the reader feeling that this story is continuing outside the confines of thie novel." --
Books in Canada (01 Jan 02)