Loving Wanda Beaver

Alison Baker has this knack for turning on the floodlamps in her characters' souls - game wardens and wise children and lost mothers, good people trying to take care of themselves and each other, to get through the day without doing harm. Always her stories are deliciously treacherous - coziness evolves into shattering intimacy; whimsy into the most lucid good sense; humor into the sad, unending surprise of never finding the lives we once thought we'd have -- Bob Shacochis