Writing about her experiences judging a major fiction contest, Diana Wagman had this to tell us about the book that won:

“But the writing is elegant and deceptively simple. The characters are complex and their problems are very modern, set against an old-fashioned world that is believably portrayed. There are beautiful, poetic descriptions and gritty, terse paragraphs. [ . . .] In the end it was about voice. It was about distinction— a story that could only be told in that way, with that character, in that combination of style and craft.”

– from “Confessions of a Literary Judge” by Diana Wagman, published in Poets & Writers, November/December 2003