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We all know adults who are stranded in the amber of adolescence. Growing older but not necessarily growing up, is the central theme of these stories, featuring characters who, to varying degrees, are stuck in adolescent roles of rebel, outcast, enfant terrible and cool kid. All are linked by losses - of looks, of status, of job security, of health, of confidence - which forces them to life's inevitable turning point. Given that we are living in an age where fifty is the new forty, and forty is the new thirty, and twenty is the new god-knows-what, these stories, with their sometimes painful, sometimes funny and always unflinching truths, resonate.

"The women in Diane Bracuk's probing fiction are crossing what Joseph Conrad called "the shadow line"  -  the threshold between youth and the middle age  -  and it is how they extract meaning from the crossing that makes this story collection so intriguing. A worthy read." — Eva Stachniak, the author of The Winter Palace and Empress of the Night, two novels of Catherine the Great.