PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewCara Blue Adams’s evocative first book is described as a collection of interlinked short stories, though it could easily be classified as a novel without the padding. We do not, after all, describe movies with time jumps as a collection of short films. Perhaps we should. We could dispense with the \'15 seconds earlier\' chyrons forever ... While each episode is somewhat discrete, this carefully curated collection forms a greater and more satisfying whole than the sum of its happy and sad parts ... Adams succeeds in capturing the microcosm of a young woman’s ordinary struggle in modern America, and it turns out to be pretty devastating ... There is a casual brutality in the manner with which Adams carves out Kate’s progression from student angst to adult crises ... This sense of things ending before they have begun suffuses the book with a sadness only slightly leavened by sensuous descriptions of an Arizona evening, or the scent of a New England sweater ... Through Kate’s particular losses, Cara Blue Adams does a fine job of showing the impossibility of innocence in a world that doesn’t recognize your worth.
