Reviews of the collection have been generally positive. Nancy Pearl, in Booklist, announces, “This collection of linked short stories introduces a writer we should watch for in years to come.” She finds the stories graceful and insists that Walbert's “use of a fractured narrative works like a prism to reveal the broken lives of her two main characters.” Don Lee in Ploughshares concludes that Walbert “gives us haunting portraits of two women, “while her “prose [is] always lyrical, [with] images and phrases recurring to great effect.”

A Publishers Weekly reviewer praises “Walbert's meticulous, unshakably sad collection” but determines that “sometimes these enigmatic stories are precious and overworked, straining toward a hush of despair.” More frequently, however, “they resonate with surprising pathos, and these moments establish Walbert as one of the season's most promising, idiosyncratic new writers.”

While Christine DeZelar-Tiedman in the Library Journal admires the stories...