Book of the Month: The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (2019) Critical Evaluation "It takes guts to write a fairy tale these days. No P.R. blurb is complete without the descriptors 'searing,' 'probing,' 'challenging' or the like. The use of destabilizing narrative techniques (which often force critics to either include spoilers or to be oblique in order to avoid them) is so prevalent as to seem almost de rigueur. At a moment when everything in the world feels on the verge of falling apart, there seems to be a widespread cultural expectation (in the West, anyway) that serious art — the [...]