Blood and Milk

All the stories in this collection are fascinating; they deal with universal themes but contain original peculiarities (and some quirky narrators!) From a new Israeli mother in living in Baghdad to a young boy in the Midwest to a woman waiting to hear the results of a biopsy, all the characters are real and engaging -- and they have some remarkable stories to tell. They kept me up way past my bedtime . . .

Solowitz has the ability to bring in the pain and pleasure of day-to-day life. I rarely feel that she is idealizing. And I always feel that she is observing. When the narrator is uncomfortable, tired, angry, the reader feels it. Aroused, and the reader feels it. There is tremendous uncertainty in this book's narrators--as there is in everyday people. And yet there is true instinct at work, a guiding force. I'm sure yet I'm not sure. The organic quality of that thing we call free will.