PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe experience of reading the collection at times feels like strolling through a graveyard ... This memorializing casts a shadow over the stories at the outset — it is hard not to imagine that what we are about to witness is a glimpse into a real life that, if not cut short, was haunted by frustrated desire, the threat of violence, or isolation. The same is true of the stories that are not explicitly in honor of the dead. These too bear dedications, likely for living friends. The effect is no less somber: even when the stories veer into allegory or abstraction, they never lose the sense of being biographical accounts of people locked in a bitter, losing battle with a society that does not want them ... His writing has a unique set of concerns: how to exist in a perpetual, unstable present; how to make sense of the confusion produced when a mind cannot look forward, only backward — or perhaps worse, inward. For the most part, these are concerns Abreu confronts narratively. Elsewhere, however, he employs both formal and stylistic experimentation that, for many readers, might feel less effective, or perhaps overly obtuse ... he difficulty in reading through some of these intertwined, frantic identities is not unlike the challenge of parsing a single, clear image from the blur of several superimposed photographs ... Even in the book’s more optimistic stories, Abreu is always bittersweet, never saccharine.
