O’Reilly’s craftsmanship is dazzlingly assured. She has a powerfully developed auditory imagination, orchestrating patterns of rhythm, syntax and sound to brilliantly varied expressive effect. Her sentences are often long and complex, but each phrase rings out clearly, each image shapes itself distinctly in the mind, and the whole sentence drives through on a flow of sinuous and unbroken energy. She’s an intellectual adventurer, too: her love of out-of-the-way words sent me to the dictionary or Wikipedia quite often, always with pleasure and a sense of mental enlargement. When she uses arcane words she does so with a vivid sense of … Continue Reading