It is Lee Smith's "love for her characters"--as the San Francisco Chronicle wrote--that gives her work "a down-home flavor, as satisfying as an old-fashioned Sunday dinner." And she certainly loves the people in the stories that make up her first collection since Cakewalk.

These are average folks whose average lives are suddenly shaken up by the eclipses that come to us all--illness, death, divorce, the loss of faith, of children, of dreams. The stories of these eclipses--sometimes uproariously funny, sometimes unbearably sad, occasionally visionary--suggest that love can bring meaning to even the craziest lives.

From the book jacket