PLAYING WITH SHADOWS

This is a wonderful book of stories. Gloria Whelan is adept in creating the small luminous details that bring a story to life. She is miraculously fair to all her characters, young and old, and her accounts are both funny and frightening. She is an urbane and generous writer, and her stories are concentrated with feeling and intelligence.
Charles Baxter

“Keeping House with Freud” (an aging analyst and her final patient) touches beautifully on its smallest details and, without a trace of artifice, brings them to a moment of melancholy and perfect irony. Always capable, varyingly light of step, and with a small number of achievements that are exquisite.
Kirkus Review

“Humor, wit and polish distinguish this satisfying collection.”
Publisher’s Weekly

“Playing with Shadows” has a pleasing worldliness; it takes in young and old, rich and poor, servants and masters, husbands and wives. And Whelan’s chief gift as a writer, her power of empathy, is a great strength.
Chicago Tribune

What you notice immediately in “Playing with Shadows” is the authority of Gloria Whelan’s voice: the assertiveness, knowledge, and power of her narrator. It’s a soothing voice, and you trust it; you hunker down and put yourself in the hands of the narrator – she’ll tell you everything, you feel, and it’ll all be true.
Michigan Quarterly Review

Telling detail, atmosphere and psychological nuance distinguish the 14 stories in “Playing with Shadows.” The settings are diverse, but these genteel people share a bond: they have collided with change and have the bruises to show for it. …This collection represents a substantial body of quality work. It also celebrates an astute author who writes with poetic skill and restraint of the human passage.
Detroit Free Press