Prances and bubbles along with the gay insouciance of a compulsive storyteller

Mary Wesley is high-spirited and inventive, and keeps her wayward plot moving forward at a spanking pace

Wesley's narration is as fast and surprising as ever; her subplots are well worked out and rich in detail

A charming love story and social comedy

Once again she deploys her admirably comic skill to good effect; puncturing the pompous, exposing humbug, nudging our perceptions in the direction of the absurd

Incendiary

This mesmerizing novel places a mathematical mind, poet's imagination, and voodoo queen's superstition in an athlete's body and sets to work, in a town stark as a blackboard, on the problem of Death. Pitting axes against angst, kids against cancer, soap against sex, wax numbers against depression, and love against the certainty of the beloved's doom, Aimee Bender nevertheless arrives--with wit, grace, and proof (that math is funny)--at compassion

Aimee Bender writes in a skillfully minimal way, everything very tight and poignant and sharp and often burning, quick to get to things and out of them, but still providing us with significant characters of emotional depth