The short stories in reflect the real day-to-day life of ordinary people of different ages, genders, professions, and ethnicities with connections to a believable world of imagined events. They take place in the former Soviet Union, in the United States, and in the emigration in-between. Love, marriage, infidelity, disillusionment, intimacy and the lack of it, rootlessness are subjects that move from an improbable reality to surreal events. As the American novelist Maureen Howard noted, "This is Regine Rayevsky Fisher's strong suit, one she shares with many of the best writers who have emerged from the Soviet Union that was and the Eastern bloc, such as Kundera and Berberova. Fisher knows when to fade from a scene, when to draw conclusions that have the double vision of innocence and the informed telling." Some of the stories slap you in the face, some make you want to cry your heart out-they are wonderfully entertaining and also very wise. The author has a satirical talent for exposing so many of our human flaws and showing how people behave from insecurity and their fragile egos. But there is tenderness and forgiveness too. These tales about simple people pose more questions than answers about morals, respectability, and roads taken and missed. Most of all they are about love that holds everything together on our planet.