I feel a little bad that I wasn't more taken with this collection. Saunders' amazing talent is on display, but I thought the interest generated in each story was mixed, and some didn't really wow me at all, including the title story. The world that is imaginatively reworked in In Persuasion Nation was much more compelling, though evoked in a few stories here, such as the amazing "Escape from Spiderhead" and "The Semplica Girl Diaries." The latter, sadly, is near-fatally marred by the awkward and unnecessary sentence structures. 
 I wonder whether there was a doesn't-fare-well-on-audiobook problem here, except that the reader was absolutely perfect in capturing the voice of the various narrators, so I thought. This is especially obvious in stories like "Al Roosten" and "My Chivalric Fiasco," but even in one of the most subtle and interesting of all, I thought: "Home."