I’ve always been careful about those to whom I recommend your adult reads. And then I tell them they must allow Kathe to take over their brain for a while. Reading your work is like learning a new language. Coming up for air feels like taking a break from an absorbing creative project or an algebraic proof. The world looks slightly different afterward. Good stuff.

I remember having a deeply visceral response to “Angels in Love,” the first short story by you that I read, that sense of bumping into a stranger at a party and before you know it you’ve spent the whole evening talking (and by golly, some years later, we met at a gathering and spent the whole day talking!). And beyond always enjoying your work, I was firmly in the camp of “puppets, you say? tell me more…” when you first told me about Under the Poppy, and now I’ve been privileged to have read the manuscript. It’s dazzling. The world you create is so rich and real and, yes, visceral — chaotic and crumbling and grotesque (in its more decorative or artistic definition), with some of the most compelling and accessible writing in any of your books for adults. It is full of heartbreaking characters, every one of them so flawed and human (yes, even Vidor). I really wasn’t ready for it to be done, I wasn’t ready to walk out of that dark theater back into the light of day, I’m still blinking a bit. Brava!

Friend show, art simply super