In these well crafted stories a range of vision from postmodern to Gothic exposes a startling and, at times, disturbing reality underlying the familiar. In Crow Time women are independent, enterprising, and mostly indestructible. Along with their men and children they meet the challenge of a shifting, tricky world where there are no victims, but where, just as the continents are unstable, all that is beloved is unpredictable.

In these tales love is almost always startling - as startling as love of music, as cabbages, as Christ. As in her previous collection, Nectar at Noon, her characters, as Nina Sonenberg wrote in the New York Times, "reach back for transcendence and even touch it, but it's squeezed back into daily life." But in Crow Time the characters are fierce, resilient survivors who, because of their inner visions, withstand everyday mediocrities.