"I've been dipping in and out of this book since my early 20s. I completely respond to one of its basic notions — self-responsibility. It's about preparing for a good death, and I've found that in having a child, you're confronted by your mortality each day as the child grows and blossoms. But every single element in our Western society is a denial of death. We don't want to think about it, which compounds the terror we feel about it. This book helps one to navigate one's way through the terror."

"This is a page-turner that begins with a magical premise—a mind born new right at the moment of a body’s death. We begin with death and move backward through a life, as seen through the ‘eyes’ of this new mind, and we track the actions of the character’s body through everything it did before it died. This is curious enough, but the mind telling the story understands the world backward, as if on ‘rewind.’ Does this make any sense? It does in Amis’s hands and has a bizarrely profound impact."

"Porter accomplishes an extraordinary amount in a few pages. She addresses the horrors of war from a woman’s perspective; she touches on the difficult a terrain a working woman must navigate in a man’s world; she creates a desirable male, describing his physical allure from a female point of view: quite rare in most fiction. But most astonishing, in chronicling Miranda’s near death experience and her reluctant return to life, she describes the indescribable and deals with the most profound human issues: life, death, identity, in shatteringly beautiful prose."