Reading this collection felt like playing a contact sport: it's visceral, high-energy, and it hurts but in a way where you're glad of it and proud for making it through. It's one of my favorite books I've read this year. Many of the stories deal with childhood and Otis captures that vivid, raw emotion of experiencing a world you don't fully understand, the reeling, dizzying momentum of moving through that world when you don't even know yourself yet. ( )

This is a wonderful selection of stories from an author that is new to me. The stories range from sort of a magical surrealism (similar to the stories of Kelly Link), to more straightforward science fiction. I enjoyed both modes of writing, but the science fiction is grounded in the world as it is now: children born and raised on the moon struggle to make lives on an earth that doesn't want them; a sex robot falls from the sky and is found by a group of kids; aliens pay to watch a couple kids to fight. The characters are recognizable and sympathetic, even when their motivations are unknown, even to themselves. My favorite of the stories is the last one, "Ultimate Housekeeping Megathrill 4," in which a mother in a dystopian world retreats into a video game version of her life to try to cope with the chaos that is going on around her. Her addiction, and the frustration and desperation of her family as they try to get her to respond to her, read as very real to me, in spite of the science fiction milieu. I look forward to reading what this author writes in the future. ( )