This is a brutal portrait of China and base human nature. I felt like I could see and hear the characters spit their lines at each other. The writing felt real and dirty - and visual like a movie. Sometimes I took my eyes from the page to wince because the images hit so hard - but I couldn't wait to be engrossed in the next short story.

She never saw the purse snatcher, though she was as obvious to him as a cinder block dropped into a pond. He was a pro, a shadow of a boy who existed between pauses in conversation, clinging to the underside of memory like a fly. She would have felt a dead weight in her chest if she had seen him. His hair fell in heavy ropes over his face, which was brown as old leaves and crossed with amber scars. Ten years old, he was wastewater wrung from the sponge of the world.