McElmurray is a powerful writer, successful at rendering both the bleakness of lives lived without hope and the fleeting promise in single moments of recognition. Her mountains pass the test of durable literature.

—Women's Review of Books

This is a story about real life, about people trying to finish things that cannot be finished, about trying to raise the dead, about trying to return mothers to their children and wives to their husbands. . . . But it is also a story about love, about how salvation can be located . . . in the human experience of love.

—Chicago Tribune

McElmurray has a singular gift—she takes the black-and-white hardscrabble world of eastern Kentucky and transmutes it into something shimmering and beautiful through the prism of magic realism, telling the truth and more than the truth. A work of stunning originality.

—Lee Smith

One of the most powerful and haunting while thoroughly controversial Eastern Kentucky novels in the 1990s . . . a gutsy and innovative addition to regional literature.

—Appalachian Heritage