PositiveThe New York TimesMs. Russell writes with such psychological precision and such a fully imagined sense of what Derek’s harrowing war experience was like that the more surreal aspects of the story simply become a mirror of a surreal world in which death for a young American arrives in a faraway palm grove in Iraq, a world in which soldiers find that a good-will gesture has set them up for an ambush … The more persuasive stories in this book feature genuine outsiders who consider themselves monsters — because they are ugly or different, set apart from others by their looks or experience or self-conscious self-loathing. It is these monsters that Ms. Russell portrays with such sympathy and inventiveness.
