The most recent issue of Texas Books in Review contains a review of The Floating Order entitled "Veneration of Madness" by Rene LeBlanc. The issue can be ordered through their website or found through the academic database Proquest.Here's an excerpt:
"The stories in Erin Pringle’s The Floating Order focus on images and ideas frequently linked in Western literature—fairy tales and reality, madness and imagination, death and children. [. . .] So, what saves Pringle’s stories from the realm of the exhausted metaphor of madness and childhood as sources of truth, ones Faulkner used long before in As I Lay Dying?
"First, the titles themselves are typically deftly interwoven with the stories and freighted with poetic meaning. Examples occur in the name of the title story and of ones like 'Looker,' in which the 'looker' is both attractive and a perpetual searcher and seer. Other instances of conscious, focused attention to poetic language, to the boundaries and intersections of poetry and fiction, include Pringle’s use of ellipses and the child narrator voice. These allow such illogical pairings as that represented in 'they took him back to where children turn into fireworks.'"
