Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul
Reviews

A "once-in-a-lifetime book."-St. Paul Pioneer Press

"This book will give a new appreciation for the diversity of neighbors and neighborhoods"
-Whistling Shade

"They come from Italy and from Cambodia, from Ireland and Germany, from Poland and Mexico. Or they are very simply, from here. They live on Front Street, or Rice Street, or the West Side and spend their nights cleaning offices. Or else looking at the moon and stars over Lake Phalen. Or they might work for three months at a time in the Kuparak oil fields in Alaska. Or as the Fat Brush painter, who only paints for people he likes. In their spare time they might build a white gazebo for a neighbor or mount a plaster statue of Mary in an upright bathtub in the back yard, or flee to Payne Avenue, 'where sin and danger lurks'. Or they might well go on a search for the soul.

I defy anyone to read Twelve Branches: Stories from St. Paul and try not to fall in love! This wonderful book speaks so fully and eloquently of a world of passion, of people who get in fights in bars and pass on seeds to their neighbors and plan funerals and talk in whispers in the night about beauty and the dark secrets of life. Once you pick it up you can't put it down. And you know when you finish it that these people are real and visible and big, like the American landscape." -Judith Guest