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From the admired author of Saint and The Perez Family come stories to touch the heart and mind alike, resonant with the sense of magic in everyday life and the generous way with character that are the hallmarks of Christine Bell's writing. In "Mockingbird", the one sound sleeper in a family of insomniacs recounts the travails of being married to a woman whose quest for a good night's rest drives her to ever more maddening quirks of behavior, and then into the arms of another man. "A Pillow and a Rock" invites us to imagine what may really have happened in the Presley household on the night Elvis and his stillborn (or was he?) twin brother came into the world, from the perspective of a worn-out country midwife faced with a seemingly insoluble dilemma: what to do with a motionless baby who won't cry, but won't die either? In "Cliff from Chicago, Annie McDermott, and Me", a woman finds her thoughts and feelings trapped in the space of what-might-have-been, when the muggers she escapes by a lucky accident kill the next woman they see. "The Good Thief" allows us to share the life chances of an ambitious young woman on the make, and shows us the strange consequences of thinking you're tougher than you really are. In the title story, we watch with a laugh in our throats and a growing sense of wonder and sympathy as the narrator sells the made-up story of her royal relatives to the tabloids and suffers her first broken heart. "Mercy" introduces us to two elderly women now retired in Florida - an adulteress from the Bronx and a faithful wife from Brooklyn - and the source of their remarkable bond years before in a snowbound bowling alley in Queens.

"...[A] first collection of nine stories that limn the quirks and quandaries of the human heart with sympathy and a wry sense of the absurd....Affecting and unpretentiously original: a quiet delight."

Kirkus, 04/01/1996

"Unlike a lot of contemporary collections, which suffer from a monotony of style and subject, this one is remarkably diverse in its sensibility. Its nine stories range all over the aesthetic map....[A] refreshing collection--accessible, entertaining, and infused with the improvisational energies of a writer who refuses to play it safe."

Gary Krist, New York Times Book Review, 07/06/1996

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