Publishers' Weekly and BooklistStarred Review: Finalist for the Oregon Book Award KEN KESEY AWARD FOR FICTION . ~ Edward Champion of the Washington Post: top-ten-books-of-2008: "…there are invaluable lessons here on how to take a wild idea and make it concise and enthralling. The collection contains unsettling allegories and gleefully imaginative premises. There isn’t a single story in here that doesn’t take some kind of narrative gamble. And while the dice-rolling doesn’t always pay off, it certainly remains hot in your hands. " ~ Ray Olson, May 15, 2009 Booklist top ten: "Seventeen strange stories ranging in tone from grim to laugh-out-loud ludicrous all look at love, which they depict, with all due respect, as fairly insane. What has us laughing to keep from crying on one page, vice versa the next." ~ Rick Kleffel: "She can hook you with just a few words and after that, you're on your own in the emotionally vivid worlds she creates. And for all the pain she wrests from her characters and thrusts in your face, for all the vivid anger and wrenching anguish she puts the reader through, there's a sort of clarity here that's positively cathartic." ~ L. Timmel Duchamp The American Book Review, "… imaginative, sharply observed collection of short fiction."