RaveChronogram Magazine\"In her short stories, Marie-Helene Bertino transforms banalities into the breathtakingly surreal ... As she did in her novel Beautyland, Bertino quietly injects magical realism into her writing, creating a vibration between daily tedium and a vast imagination. Her protagonists are regular people dealing with extraordinary situations. Rather than dramatizing the unreal phenomena, or drawing attention to how bizarre the situation is, she introduces the absurd in the same way she might describe making a pot of coffee. It provides a sort of delightful catharsis for the mind to come up with transportive scenarios without needing to justify their existence or mechanisms.\
