PositiveThe GuardianVlautin’s realism lacks the granularity of, say, Raymond Carver, where even the most everyday objects or events are imbued with symbolic significance ... Horace’s goal may sound incredible but it doesn’t feel that way because Vlautin is writing about ordinary people in clean, spare language. He viscerally communicates the pain and damage to the body after a fight, although, for me, the fight scenes could be more visual. This matters less than it might because the book is about identity not boxing ... Don’t Skip Out on Me shines a light on the broken-down and the drifters; it is a bruising yet surprisingly tender study of the need for human connection, and the way that urban landscapes can be more isolating than any wilderness ... Horace’s search for identity and meaning amid the white noise of urban life feels like a curiously relevant tale for us all.
