Reviews

“Strangers in America is a fascinating, richly textured novel. Peoples lives can be very different from the inside, the narrator states early on. And that’s just where this finely crafted novel brings us inside lives. These lives, however, are no run-of-the-mill, nor indeed are the ways in which they are explored and exposed. They are the lives of people on the edge, anonymous small timers, people who struggle daily against the often overwhelming tide of disadvantage. It is a heroic novel, unflinching in the face of cruelty and exploitation, conspicuously un-preachy and most memorably deeply caring. Erika Meyers is deserving of all the plaudits that will, no doubt, come her way. ” James Ryan, author of Seeds of Doubt

“Erika Meyers’ Kafkaesque fable gives us a contemporary America of disappearing prosperity, endangered jobs, and fragmented families as witnessed specifically in the city grit of Cleveland, Ohio. This is a world of nervous squirrels dying of heart attacks in humane non-kill traps, of homes with multiple door locks and burglar alarms where guns are hidden beneath the couch, behind the fridge, under dressers, taped under tables. It is a frightening and utterly convincing portrait of the lower levels of American society, but not one without humor and hope. Free of caricature, Strangers in America is peopled with individuals rich in complexity: a homeless man who will shelter uninvited in someone’s home yet turn down the resident’s offered handout; Amish cleaning women who turn on all the TVs and radios while they work; workers happy to get a full-time job yet guilty in the knowledge that they got it only because they are willing to work for less than the former employee made….When you finish Strangers in America, our narrator Helena Adamzik will still be there: tough, dead-pan funny, proud and enduring.” Robert Flanagan, final judge of Great Lakes Novel Prize 2009-2010

“Erika Meyers explores human conditions of health, home and work through points of tension in which we’d all like to be empowered as individuals, but social circumstances turn our lives in random ways, like elements of the weather.” John Olski review of The Career of Snow, Portage Magazine, a review of upper Midwestern writing, art, and culture