It's one of the most convincingly lonely and dislocated voices I've read. We don't know why Lamb walked out of her life at 16 but, with both parents dead and no siblings, we know there wasn't a great deal to walk away from. Then Doggo turns up. The unravelling of her tightly controlled life. Lamb walks a high wire of loneliness.
Emotional numbness can be a powerful fictional tool.
It allows a novelist to put a caricaturist's heightened spin on reality. She remembers more comfortable times - a time, for instance, when she had a mother and dreamt of going to medical school. Hard to tell, hard to know. If only all fiction made us worry and care so hard, posed us such dreadfully difficult questions.