I really enjoyed this short story collection. The writing style, characters, and settings were evocative and emotional. Carlson knows how to write a character who is stuck, then how to get that character unstuck in a way that moves the reader.
It was fun experiencing all these stories by the same author in the same day with the 24 hour book club. I liked finding common themes and motifs running throughout, even when the people and situations he was writing about were quite different from each other.