Ohlin is a magician. It’s not just that the stories are — individually and collectively — stunning; it’s that she makes it look so easy ... they unfold with an almost startling ease, warmly welcoming to the reader from their very first lines ... The story builds — as do most in the collection — to a moment of understanding, a key line or paragraph that simultaneously closes off the narrative while opening the character to a change in the direction of their life. That epiphanic quality is somewhat unfashionable in our jaded times, but that doesn’t matter: Ohlin manages, time and again, to reveal the underlying truths not only of her characters, but of her readers.
... explor[es] desire and grief through a finely drawn and eclectic cast of characters ... Ohlin’s sly irony leavens the aching plights of characters for whom closure is unattainable.
... [a] very fine collection ... Ohlin’s stories have a quiet elegance to them and a restraint, although they’re filled, too, with grief and with loss ... Some of the stories are told in the first person and some in the third, but, either way, there is a kind of sameness that stretches across the book as a whole. The sameness has less to do with what happens (or doesn’t happen) and more to do with how the characters sound—they all seem to have the same voice. Still, Ohlin handles them with such nuance that, in the end, the book is a pleasure to behold ... A wry and moving collection that supplies no easy, unearned endings.
... another rich collection full of insights and sticky contradictions ... Ohlin also does a great job capturing her characters’ perspectives on life ... Throughout, Ohlin reveals the depth of her characters with empathy and precision. The strongest stories are more than worth the price of admission.
In Ohlin’s collection, fiction meanders like life does, and the reader is carried along in the current ... Her prose is clean and unadorned with poetic flourish. She maintains a narrative distance from her characters even in first person, and I felt not immersed in the stories but as though I were watching through a window as other people’s lives unfolded ... In several stories, Ohlin introduces characters who seem to be coded as Black, yet Ohlin dances around the issue of race, as though too shy to mention it. The reader is left to parse out stereotypical signifiers of race ... Writing about race in fiction is complicated and fraught, especially for a white author, but this approach does not seem to be the solution ... The collection is best when it turns its attention to the great sweep of human life, how our years are filled with unexpected success or failure, how people reveal or hide themselves.
