RaveThe Believer...Karen Russell’s stories are unnerving, darkly funny, and immensely enjoyable. Their standard recipe takes a common coming-of-age theme...folds it into a surreal situation...and tops it off with superb, efficient sentences. Mix well and you’ve got one of the strongest debuts in recent memory ... Moving skillfully between the banal and the extraordinary—a dingy dining room one minute, secret underwater caves the next—Russell blurs the boundaries between the real and the surreal until we become hyperaware and suspicious of every detail. It’s an effect that lasts even after you set the book down ... These haunting stories confidently eschew tidy, \'life’s pretty swell after all\' resolutions. Instead, Russell concludes them with harrowing abruptness, showing how childhood, for all its supposed freedom and ease, can in fact be painful, dangerous, and rife with near-fatal miscalculations.
