Menschen im Transit, in Aktion, in Veränderung - ich wusste gar nicht, dass das eines meiner liebsten Literaturthemen ist. Doch die zehn Kurzgeschichten dieses Buches überraschen mich damit, dass ich etwas über mich als Leserin entdecke. Wenn jemand sich traut, auf jemanden zugeht, Verletzungen bloß legt, sich um sich und die eigenen Wunden kümmert - all das mag ich. Dazu in vielen der Geschichten: eine Stimmung der Freundlichkeit (auch wenn gerade die erste und die letzte Geschichte aus dieser Stimmung herausbrechen). Mich hat es gepackt: Tränen in den Augen, ein Lächeln, ein „good-for-her“, überhaupt viel Gefühl. Ich war so begeistert, ich habe gleich begonnen ein nächstes Buch der Autorin zu lesen. Mit ihren Figuren und ihrer Sprache bringt sie etwas in mir zum Klingen. „Love, he thought. It would come out son enough. Words and feelings were alle churned up together inside him, finding each other like lost parts of an atom. He didn’t try to push them apart or away. He let them float in the new fullness in his chest.” “[I] felt she had no more experience than I did, felt her neck and her hair, felt for the first time that I was feeling what I should be feeling, as if for once all the sharp awkward fragments of my life suddenly fell into their proper slots.” “The second last date Mitchell had had after his wife left was with a woman who worked on the insurance office next door. Sometimes she’d come in when she got off work, and even though she talked too much and only looked at the oversized books with photos in any given section, he agreed to go to the movies with her when she’d asked him. They chose a comedy, but she kept whispering in his ear right before every joke, so that everyone in the audience was laughing except them. He’d come out of the theater excruciatingly unsatisfied, far more unsatisfied than missing jokes should have left him. He felt abstracted and disjointed, and it occurred to him that the sensation was only a slight magnification of he felt all the time.”