Starred review...“Howard’s strength, besides lapidary language, is the ability to build scenes around quotidian activities: starting a wood stove, cleaning, walking a dog, cooking chili and, in a pivotal segment, plotting to banish a large colony of attic-dwelling bats. The red tape and repetitiveness of coping with an addicted adult child fuels suspense as the most pressing question persists: Will Del ever be free of the onus, even just in memory, of caring for all the tormented men in her life? Such stark scenarios will be cathartic for readers who have dealt with them firsthand, and profoundly cautionary for those who haven’t.”

— Kirkus Review (3/1/2009)

“Junkies, cons, brothers, sons, mothers, lovers—how can Ginnah Howard know all these sorts so inwardly, so passionately well and weave together their lives so suspensefully? Hers is a tour de force of the most valuable, the most poetic, the hardest earned insights—those that are intensely felt, imagined, lived. I don’t recall ever having been so struck by a first novel before.”

— Matt Leone, Director
    Colgate Writers’ Conference

“A gritty, unblinking, compassionate portrait of addiction—the deceptions, the exhausting repetitions, and most of all the agonizing dilemmas of parental love, which may or may not have the power to save but can never stop trying.”

— Joan Wickersham, author of the
    National Book Award Finalist,
    The Suicide Index