Library Journal
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These connected short stories, set in the coal-mining town of Bakerton, PA, span the 1940s to the present. Beautifully written and deeply moving, they feature characters whose lives have not turned out the way they had imagined. In "Beast and Bird," a young woman gets a brief taste of a very different life when she's hired as a maid for a wealthy family. In "Broken Star," the narrator belatedly understands her real relationship to her aunt. The main character in "A Place in the Sun" battles addiction to try to be the man everyone wants him to be. One character, Joyce Novak, appears in several of the stories at various points in her life, her struggles some of the most haunting in the book. Some episodes end painfully, but occasionally the protagonists rise up and find hope and strength amid the disappointments. All of their struggles linger in the mind. This is a masterly collection. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of Haigh's novel Baker Towers, which features some of the same characters, and of Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, who also excel at re-creating small-town life. [See Prepub Alert., 8/27/12.]-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Library Journal
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

These related short stories weave a pattern that defines the small coal-mining town of Bakerton, PA. In stories that describe events from the town's heyday to its decline, residents struggle to make sense of their lives, with those who escape forever shaped by their upbringing. Award-winning (L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award) author Haigh expertly explores the many relationships, entanglements, and long-term effects of life in a small town over several generations, and this material is well read by Therese Plummer, Alex Cendese, Chris Baskous, and Cynthia Darlow. -verdict Readers who enjoyed Haigh's Mrs. Kimble or Baker Towers and those who enjoy reading about the human condition will enjoy this book. ["This is a masterly collection. Highly recommended for fans of...Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Strout, who also excel at re-creating small-town life," read the starred review of the HarperCollins hc, LJ 2/1/13.-Ed.]-Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Providence (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Despite its treacly title, this collection of short stories shows depth, understanding and compassion rather than sentimentality. Most of the stories take place in or near Bakerton, Pa., populated largely by Polish and Italian Catholic immigrants. "Beast and Bird," the initial story in the collection, takes us back to World War II and focuses on the life of Annie Lubicki, a serving girl for the Nudelmans in New York City's Upper West Side. Annie's life is one of domestic dreariness and loneliness. She meets a potential boyfriend, Jim, on a double date, but his anti-Semitism troubles her. Instead, she feels drawn to Daniel Nudelman, the son in the family, but she's displaced when the Nudelmans' nephew permanently "visits" from Poland to escape the ravages of the war. In "Broken Star," Regina's Aunt Melanie comes to visit Regina along with her daughter, Tilly. Regina hasn't seen her aunt in over 12 years and questions the lengthy stay by relatives she feels are intrusive. Only years later does she discover that Melanie, who has died, was actually her sister and that Melanie had needed a kidney and was desperately looking for a donor who matched. "A Place in the Sun" introduces us to Sandy, who's trying to fight a gambling compulsion but counter-intuitively takes his girlfriend, Marnie, to Vegas to celebrate his birthday. We find that for years he's been trying to escape the life he left behind in Bakerton--a father who died in the mines and a "bleak small-town life worse than jail, a prison from which no one escaped." Haigh's narratives are beautifully realized stories of heartbreak, of qualified love and of economic as well as personal depression.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

In this collection of interlinked short stories, Haigh returns to Bakerton, Pennsylvania, and the characters she created for Baker Towers (2005). As the once prosperous mining town crumbles around the residents, family secrets are uncovered, lessons are learned, and the inhabitants seem to discover that the world around them is not the sum of the world, indeed. Beast and Bird finds a young woman working as a maid to a Jewish family in New York City a very different kind of place from her family's farm in Pennsylvania. Something Sweet follows a spinster teacher and her star pupil, a young man who is adored by the girls but beaten by his male classmates for being different. And in What Remains, the town sees the last remaining heir to the Baker Brothers coal mines suffer an ignoble death. Haigh has a gift for creating believable characters of all kinds and placing them into realistic often heartbreaking situations. A must-read for fans of Baker Towers and a good addition to all short story collections.--Vnuk, Rebecca Copyright 2010 Booklist