RaveThe Washington Independent Review of Books... tactful lyricism ... To read them is to enter a world where strangeness is a language with a grammar all its own, and total immersion the only path to fluency. Ma’s use of unreality is a terrific refashioning of the Freudian uncanny — in this case, the idea of the estranged familiar — superimposed over tales of immigrants, ex-partners, and adult children ... These stories, from their thoughtfully charted plots to their clear, compact sentences, are written with the wisdom of a traveler — unlikely to come apart and paired down to the essentials, which Ma knows include not only practicality, but beauty and strangeness, as well.
