"The quiet surface of Jane Curtis's fictional world is all about the roil beneath the surface. Her stories are peopled with women who, though often in dire straits, survive through their quiet abilities-inventiveness, memory, imagination, cheerfulness, strong observation, and humor. Her midwestern characters will evoke women glimpsed on the bus, in the checkout lane. Inhabited as well with animals-dogs and cranes and hawks -and the music of Bob Dylan, these stories are of deep lives in which life arrived to the women "with tumultuous force and carried [them] forward." -Martha Bergland, author of A Farm Under a Lake and Idle Curiosity

"Like fragments of colored glass, these brief pieces present glimmering shards of happening, moments of connection in the lives of an intriguing cast of characters who blink in and out of each other's stories, gradually accumulating to combine into a colorfully vivid mosaic of coming of age in the Midwest in the 1960s." -Christopher Chambers, author of Kind of Blue and Delta 88

"These spare, linked, beautifully written stories rise like bread into a poetic and moving whole. Whole lives, notably less affluent women's lives, are revealed and celebrated in their telling. At their best, they remind me of the brilliant stories of Tillie Olsen, another writer who probed the depths of generations of working women with grace and feeling." -Jeffrey D. Boldt, author of Blue Lake

"Four resilient women, each finding and flexing her unique voice, come together in Madison, Wisconsin, during turbulent times. Their stories cycle through innocence, hippies, dive bars, poetry and rock music, into gentrification, homelessness, racial trauma and alt-right politics. Despite upheaval, these women are centered and true, never bitter or jaded. They keep on keeping on. They endure husbands dying, lovers who wander in and slip off, a child's untimely passing, adolescent rebellion and skids into poverty. Still, they reach one another and others in the light. As author Jane Curtis quotes wisely, 'nothing is buried in her but is lit and transformed.'" -Ruth Holladay, The Indianapolis Star

"Each of these stories opens a window into the lives of characters that are often overlooked in the real world. Jane Curtis writes with such insight and compassion that she not only makes it impossible for readers to overlook these characters, she makes it impossible for us to forget them." -Andy Millman, PLATO Instructor, Madison, Wisconsin