The setting for the transformations in Seedfolks is an urban neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio—"a city of immigrants." Its Gibb Street, being the dividing line between a mostly black, Latino, and Asian neighborhood and a mostly white one, brings working-class people of many different backgrounds into one another's experience. They pass one another at the grocery stores, variety shops, and dry cleaners, for example, and they watch one another's comings and goings from their apartment windows above the street. Fleischman is a master at putting individual personalities and needs into play with a single environment. In Bull Run, it is the famous Civil War battleground. In the Coming-and-Going Men short stories, it is the New Canaan, Vermont, of 1800. In Westlandia, it is an entirely new civilization. Here in Seedfolks, it is around a vacant lot in the rundown section of Cleveland that the plot and characters are...