I really haven’t read many people Aimee Bender can be compared to. As when I read some of her short stories in 2005, her writing is not so much “fantasy” as “writing set in the normal world with fantastical elements.” This novel has less of those elements than her short stories do, yet it has the same overall feeling to me.

Mona is a numbers person. Obsessive compulsive, but not in the typical way, and perhaps beyond that. Tender and moving, sad and sometimes scary. Yet ultimately hopeful. Your heart breaks for this girl, with her worries and her need for control and her unwillingness to accept the happy… I would have happily kept reading about her long after the last page.