Wonderful book! Poetic and lyric and beautiful writing. Highly recommended! ( )

I could not put this book down. I loves the voice and the feeling of aloneness and alienation and the added layer of despair from Los Angeles. It felt real and not made-for-tv. Every part of the story was believable, the characters made me like them and hate them and care about them. ( )

Terrific. A sort of immigrants version of Play It as It Lays. Starts off with this charming funny character narrating her life and then gradually and subtly gets darker and darker. It is at it's heart very bleak and Ms. Waclawiak puts this across with this extraordinary use of the character' morbid self awareness. Everything is hopeless and bewildering and yet she soldiers on, pursuing the Russian mobster who is no good for her because there is nothing else. And Los Angeles, with it's lack of place, it's menacing emptiness is also there beautifully depicted. Painfully absurd. ( )

Fantastic little book about a young woman caught in between cultures in an Eastern European immigrant enclave of Los Angeles. Anya is an unemployed Polish-American woman with a small obsession with the Russian night club near her home. The obsession grows to encompass a particular Russian gangster of a man she sees going there. She goes so far as to change into a more Russian version of herself to seduce him, but ends up unhappy with all of her iterations-Polish, American, Russian-and the lengths that she's gone to reinvent herself, whoever she is. Really interesting, beautiful writing, thought-provoking and an all-around good read. ( )