I just returned from the Consortium sales conference in New York — where I saw Craig for the first time in 2007 — to find this excellent review of Goodbye Madame Butterfly on Bookslut today. Positive reviews are like a half hour of long, deep pranayama — they invigorate the soul of this impoverished publisher. Here are couple of my favorite bits:

In a lot of ways it is this sameness of attitude and circumstance that transforms the title from an exploration of the exotic to a refreshingly intense look at the mundane. These are the stories of Japanese women struggling to find themselves in the 21st century; by reading them westerners will likely see themselves reflected through a prism of shared hopes and disappointments.

(and)

Somewhere in America a woman is going to read about Misa and then leave to pick her own child up from school and she will know she is not alone in all her frustrations, dissatisfactions and questions about the future.

For those of you who own the book, Misa is the heroine of "Red Circles."