In an inviting and challenging series of fictions, this book will leave readers puzzling while they smile at the acrobatics of his words and techniques. Some of the stories border on "flash fiction" where incidents rather than an actual narrative drive the story, while several stories explore writing about writing. Shifts in narrative, jumps in time, intrusions into the narrative tension are all common here. But so too is pathos and compassion. While the world turns upside down in Johnston's stories, it is fiction that also ebbs and flows with human struggle, that is recognizable and relatable and, despite the challenges and uncertainties placed in the reader's path, there is always a way to see more clearly than we think we do.