Rating: 
Summary: A New Favorite
Review: The prose of this book was so lyrical I found myself reading some pages twice just too enjoy the language. This is a truly engaging book which makes us step back and examine our lives and the way in which we live. How our past shapes our future and how our 'present' is just that ... a gift!
Rating: 
Summary: An interesting premise--that is never realized
Review: The story begins with an interesting question: if you were forced to choose between saving your own life or sacrificing yourself for your best friend, what would you do? Unfortunately, the author chooses not to explore the more meaningful impact of the decision and instead focuses on the excrutiating minutia of one character's future 'life.'
The book is a quick read and I was curious to find out how things would turn out but, in the end, I was left very unsatisfied. I never really enjoyed the author's style of writing. I found her analogies, metaphors and descriptions to be trite, contrived and somewhat juvenile. The novel's saving grace was its premise, which I kept hoping would be discussed. Unfortunatley, it never was.
Rating:
Summary: not ashamed to be women's literature
Review: This is a book that isn't ashamed to be for women, a book as likely to become a classic as an Oprah pick, and deserving of both.... Read this book if you are a woman, and you want to put your experience of femininity in a contemporary context, and to live a fuller, more interesting, and more attentive life. You've never read anything like it: it'll change your life.
Rating:
Summary: brilliant and troubling
Review: This is a troubling book. What is it saying about reality? I stayed up worrying about that half the night after I finished it. Do we ever really live our lives? Is this whole thing a vision? Am I here, or am I a girl with bullet in her brain?Laura Kasichke, in all of her novels, makes the world seem very exotic. You can't eat a hamburger after reading one of her books without feeling like something BIG and WEIRD is going on... No surprise she's a poet. A truly brilliant book.
Rating:
Summary: Almost amazing
Review: This is the type of book that completely hinges on the last 30 pages. So many odd things happened throughout the book, I was dying for a great ending that would wrap up the story and give an explanation for all the the crazy happenings. However, the ending never came. I was left to image for myself why Diana acted the way she did... and for the life of me, I couldn't seem to figure out why. The reader is shown so many of Diana's thoughts it sometimes seems as though we are intruding on her fractured mind. Diana's mind is so odd... I couldn't help but wondering if this book was going to end up with Diana in a psych ward. In conclusion, this is a beautifully written book that was incredibly intruiging, but very unsatisfying.
Rating: 
Summary: Couldn't put it down
Review: What a disturbing and compelling book. I felt like I was caught up in a nightmare. The two stories told simultaneously added to the dream-like quality of the book. The adult story starts with an idyllicallic life that slowly spirals into a nightmare to close the circle of betrayal from past actions. It was haunting. The only problem I had was with the teenager story - the main character was my age and I know we didn't say things like "go girl" and "girlfriend" when I was a teenager and there was no such thing as Sunny Delight back then.
Rating:
Summary: Luminously eerie
Review: What a haunting. A perfumed ghost of a book. It lingers in a way that is desirable but also frightening. The opening sequence is dramatic and the rest of the book follows with the quiet and often sad drama of the everyday. The desire to savor and the reluctance to really be able to trust those seamless and "perfect" moments of our lives. There's a hard shine to these moments--a glare off a bright surface--that is both so "there" so present as to be a blinding glitter and so fragile that a mere shift of objects or the inevitable changing light will carry that shining away. But then the memory of that shining, a memory I've been holding and indeed haunted by for the last two weeks after reading the book, leaves a kind of glow all its own. I don't recall when I was this spellbound before. Read this book. The best things happen when a storyteller sits down with a poet's music, when a poet stops to show you what a fiction writer can do with a good ear and good eye and a set of characters so captivating their dazzle leaves a burn-in on the reader's retina days after the book has been closed.
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