Critical Praise

"There is a moral toughness in her characters -- a determination to find value and meaning in a world where value and meaning have all but disappeared -- that one sees in real people everywhere but rarely in recent American short stories. Like [Grace] Paley and Raymond Carver, Ms. Kingsolver mixes argot with aphorism, sexual frankness with delicate high-mindedness, the purely personal with class-consciousness. This is an interesting and ingratiating style, miles from the high cool of minimalism, but just as carefully wrought, and it seems especially suited to, and respectful of, the lives she wishes to dramatize, which are the lives of people unlikely to read the stories of Grace Paley or Raymond Carver or, for that matter, Barbara Kingsolver herself."

——Russell Banks, New York Times Book Review