 Their attempts to build a life together, overcoming the violence, predation, and alienation surrounding them, amount to what "Times" critic Dwight Garner has called “perhaps the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade”.The judges of the 2015 PEN/Faulkner Award praised the book for its blend of documentary detail and "incantation," stating that it "scours and illuminates the vast, traumatized America that lives, works and loves outside the castle gates.