Rating: 
Summary: Coming home and coming together again
Review: Dalton's first novel "High Strung" drew me in immediately, and held me there! It's a book of a difficult homecoming and reconnecting with a past and a present that don't completely mesh. I really loved how all of the characters were dealing with each other at the dangerous edges of their lives; that place where people are afraid of showing too much but needing to, desperately. The characters choose to come together after a long hiatus with a mixture of unease, humor and understanding. A great book!
Rating: 
Summary: High Strung Strikes a Definite Chord
Review: Dalton's first novel "High Strung" drew me in immediately, and held me there! It's a book of a difficult homecoming and reconnecting with a past and a present that don't completely mesh. I really loved how all of the characters were dealing with each other at the dangerous edges of their lives; that place where people are afraid of showing too much but needing to, desperately. The characters choose to come together after a long hiatus with a mixture of unease, humor and understanding. A great book!
Rating:
Summary: Coming home and coming together again
Review: Dalton's first novel "High Strung" drew me in immediately, and held me there! It's a book of a difficult homecoming and reconnecting with a past and a present that don't completely mesh. I really loved how all of the characters were dealing with each other at the dangerous edges of their lives; that place where people are afraid of showing too much but needing to, desperately. The characters choose to come together after a long hiatus with a mixture of unease, humor and understanding. A great book!
Rating:
Summary: Read this!
Review: I had the pleasure of reading an early copy of this book for blurb purposes, a blurb I happily handed over. It's a stunner of a debut! Keep an eye out for Dalton's short story collection -- Bulletproof Girl. The stories are complex and startling and stunning, ripe for discussions about womanhood in contemporary American society.
Rating:
Summary: High Strung
Review: I highly recommend this novel especially for the 30 somethings who are wrestling with identity crises as well as developing a sense of the importance of family and roots to all of us. Ms. Dalton has written a charming, lighthearted and on occasion a bittersweet novel to make all of us take stock of where we are in our lives and what is important to us. Take time to savor her writing.
Rating:
Summary: High Strung
Review: I highly recommend this novel especially for the 30 somethings who are wrestling with identity crises as well as developing a sense of the importance of family and roots to all of us. Ms. Dalton has written a charming, lighthearted and on occasion a bittersweet novel to make all of us take stock of where we are in our lives and what is important to us. Take time to savor her writing.
Rating:
Summary: High Strung Strikes a Definite Chord
Review: I liked this book and would recommend it without hesitation. The strength is the narrator, Merle. At her best, Merle's voice is authentic; she's smart, witty, passionate almost without realizing it. Merle's observations and her plight struck a definite chord with me as one of those, like her, who grew up in the seventies and eighties, went off to conquer the world (or at least edit porn books in London -- Merle, not me) in the nineties, and is now back nosing around the past, taking stock of how life and our loves have unfolded so far. The author, Quinn Dalton, offers up very sharp insights and a ruthless humor, the kind that comically but firmly doesn't allow people to wriggle free from accountability for their own actions. Great work in a first novel!
Rating: 
Summary: Derivative, Waste of Time
Review: In trying to grab a piece of the "Bridget Jones" market, Dalton shows herself to be a shallow, uninteresting writer who can't compete with the admittedly low brow but great fun to read "Jones." From the other reviews I'd guess this author is from Ohio. Otherwise why would so many people from there be writing great reviews of this book? Don't waste your time or money on this one. There are too many really well written books out there...
Rating:
Summary: Gracefully Hectic
Review: More and more are we high strung, for the world inevitably closes in on us as it "gets smaller," as we're now fond of saying.  Quinn Dalton nails this condition with her character Merle and with Merle's surroundings, whether Ohio or London.  As life grows more hectic and uncertain, it necessarily becomes more comical, if we only allow ourselves to see the humor; Dalton possesses an innate gift for this, which she masterfully conveys through her prose. After so many years of working side by side with her boyfriend in a pornography publishing house in London, Merle realizes that the life she has been leading cannot be hers: "I knew that I had to go home the day Terence told me about the swinging ferry. It was 7:00 A.M. and he was leaning against my clinking radiator, which we were still using even though it was mid-April, the windows misted wet, Terence smoking one of his hashish cigarettes, eyes glassy, dark red hair wreathed in yellow smoke. He was wearing his favorite turquoise ultrasuede trousers, silver-tipped Converses, and a gray jersey with a pink flower embroidered on the left breast." While it would be wrong to disclose exactly what a swinging ferry is, we can peek at Merle's anxiety dream that night, in which she and Terence were driving up the street of her childhood home in America, "except we were driving up the wrong side of the road. I was in the backseat, being chauffered by Terence, who turned full around to talk with me, ignoring oncoming traffic. I ducked and screamed, waving at him to turn around. And then the bugs appeared. Big, brightly colored jelly bugs like my father's fishing lures, climbing the half-rolled-down windows, crawling in. In his sleep, Terence turned over in my bed and brushed my shoulder, and I lurched sideways, whacking my head against the dresser."Of course, since our lives are stories, threads often woven without our conscious assent, they also vibrate with all the other trappings Shakespeare would happily point out to us: political intrigue, placement (or displacement) in history, tragedy, humility, the grace to keep moving forward and discover meaning amidst chaos.  As a small plane's engine fails during a horse-sperm delivery, a marriage proposal is given as the narrator flashes to her mother's car-crash death and her father's maneuvering--when he was a child--the tractor that his own father lost control of as he was dying.  So many angles are taken into account in Dalton's novel, reminding us that we all play essential instruments in a cosmic symphony, essential even when some of these instruments happen to be high strung.
Rating:
Summary: Gracefully Hectic
Review: More and more are we high strung, for the world inevitably closes in on us as it "gets smaller," as we're now fond of saying.  Quinn Dalton nails this condition with her character Merle and with Merle's surroundings, whether Ohio or London.  As life grows more hectic and uncertain, it necessarily becomes more comical, if we only allow ourselves to see the humor; Dalton possesses an innate gift for this, which she masterfully conveys through her prose. After so many years of working side by side with her boyfriend in a pornography publishing house in London, Merle realizes that the life she has been leading cannot be hers: "I knew that I had to go home the day Terence told me about the swinging ferry. It was 7:00 A.M. and he was leaning against my clinking radiator, which we were still using even though it was mid-April, the windows misted wet, Terence smoking one of his hashish cigarettes, eyes glassy, dark red hair wreathed in yellow smoke. He was wearing his favorite turquoise ultrasuede trousers, silver-tipped Converses, and a gray jersey with a pink flower embroidered on the left breast." While it would be wrong to disclose exactly what a swinging ferry is, we can peek at Merle's anxiety dream that night, in which she and Terence were driving up the street of her childhood home in America, "except we were driving up the wrong side of the road. I was in the backseat, being chauffered by Terence, who turned full around to talk with me, ignoring oncoming traffic. I ducked and screamed, waving at him to turn around. And then the bugs appeared. Big, brightly colored jelly bugs like my father's fishing lures, climbing the half-rolled-down windows, crawling in. In his sleep, Terence turned over in my bed and brushed my shoulder, and I lurched sideways, whacking my head against the dresser." Of course, since our lives are stories, threads often woven without our conscious assent, they also vibrate with all the other trappings Shakespeare would happily point out to us: political intrigue, placement (or displacement) in history, tragedy, humility, the grace to keep moving forward and discover meaning amidst chaos.  As a small plane's engine fails during a horse-sperm delivery, a marriage proposal is given as the narrator flashes to her mother's car-crash death and her father's maneuvering--when he was a child--the tractor that his own father lost control of as he was dying.  So many angles are taken into account in Dalton's novel, reminding us that we all play essential instruments in a cosmic symphony, essential even when some of these instruments happen to be high strung.
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