SOURCE: Cooke, Judy. “City Lights.” New Statesman and Society (30 July 1993): 39.

In the following positive review of The Laughing Academy, Cooke underscores Mackay's widespread appeal as a fiction writer.

You have to laugh at life's absurdities. It's better than being taught how to cope in the Laughing Academy, aka the Funny Farm, remembered fearfully by one of the most vulnerable characters in these stories [of The Laughing Academy] as “a sort of stale amyl-nitratey whiff, a sniff of sad, sour institutional air or a thick meaty odour.”

Shena Mackay's keen ear for dialogue is complemented by the precision of her descriptive writing. She can evoke a mood or point up a meaning with one or two carefully chosen images—dead foliage clinging to a thorn bush, or plane trees in autumn standing like “dappled benign giraffes”. The humour in this hugely entertaining new book is often hilarious, over-the-top surreal...