From the Reviews:
"In Brodetzky's writing there is no good and evil; there is only Fate, and Fate is playing games with everyone. Surprisingly, the more absurd the book’s heroes are, the more incredibly human they become. The writing imbues them with genuine vitality, with authentic characteristics of daily living and everything that comes with it: people, gossip, places, pressures, nicknames, love stories and breakups. Brodetzky stretches out the clichés and creates real "characters", ones that can be assigned to strangers in the street or encountered in everyday life.
She presents madness as the norm and turns the marginal into the central, with writing as sophisticated as it is simple. Her characters are complex to the point of irony, both ridiculous and tragic, and they deliver a disturbing message about life: what begins as a small, amusing dilemma can quickly become a tragedy marked by the evil laughter of fate."
Almog Ben Yehuda, Ynet
“Stories with a special, poignant loneliness, a rare and wonderful imagination. Brodetzy leaves her book in a twilight land existing somewhere between fantasy and nightmare, as if she's implying that this is what life in a northern development town is like: surreal, not really on the national radar, not engraved in our consciousness. A marginal existence, an existence on the sidelines, but one that contains a hidden life nonetheless."
Benjamin Tobias, Yediot Aharonot
“At face value, An Almost Olympic-Sized Pool is a book of short stories. But reading it is as delightful as reading a novel. Especially because the characters tend to pop out of their own stories and pay other stories a visit. And because from the first page, the reader is caught up in a wave of powerful emotion that grows and intensifies until the very last story. This is one of the most impressive debuts I've read in recent years. If not the most impressive. Once in a long while, a truly fresh voice bursts onto the literary scene. A voice that is impossible to compare to anything else. Ronnie Brodetzky's voice contains a rare combination of wild imagination on one hand, and the ability to create deep intimacy with the reader on the other. The characters that populate Brodetzky's stories are utterly vulnerable. They stroll around, fall in love, yearn for one another, and do wonders in their little town. A town that is incredibly universal – and at the same time terribly Israeli. The whole time I was reading the book, nothing else mattered. I immersed myself in it in a way that I haven't immersed myself in a literary work in a long time. We sometimes say: you won't be able to put this book down. In this case it should be said: you won't be able to get this book out of your heart."
Eshkol Nevo
“The stories in this book were written with compassion and distance, humor, empathy and sorrow. These are exactly the things that make up stories I love. "
Amos Oz
"Stories that capture the heart. Brodetzky creates a reality that is both crystal clear and ambiguous at the same time, and that's the beauty of these stories. Truly promising."
Nurith Gertz
“Imaginative, surprising snippets of life. Tales of love, of missing out, of adversity, of the expectations and disappointments of downtrodden people. I enjoyed the stories and the unexpected events in them. I enjoyed the colorful, imaginative writing and the characters, their world and their experiences. "
Dorit Reuveni Alon, Nuritha blog, 17/09/2016
"Readers' hearts will go out to these characters, each and every one, for they carry great pain in their hearts."
Greek Goddess blog