"In my opinion, this book is not fiction, but read it as anything you like. An average kind of white woman flies off to Australia thinking she’s about to be given some kind of award by the indigenous people. She gets there, and they give her one—only it is not what she expected. In teaching her who they are, they initiate her into the deeper mysteries of life. If this book were a breeze, it would blow you over. It’s even better hearing the author on tape."

"I was not prepared for the journey this compelling novel took me on. Or so I thought. I knew nothing of the lives of Puerto Rican immigrants to the United States, and certainly very little of the lives of the children. This book changed that. It is a book of such power that it is as if a completely new layer of the American experience has been exposed to our view. And like many a great work of fiction, not one line is wasted and every single word rings true."

"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."

"From the first lines of Celan’s “Todesfuge”: Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown/ we drink it at noon in the morning we drink it at night/ we drink and we drink it Celan’s poems are terrifying and beautiful, many of them reflect his experience of the Holocaust. His parents died in a concentration camp, he was imprisoned in a labor camp. Language is Celan’s tool of combat and survival, and of the evocation of memory. I have always preferred poetry and prose to fiction. Poetry condenses."