"By turns catastrophic and luminous, Inner China, in Jennifer Hayashida's translation, is unflinching in its gaze, economical in its language, and fearless as it enters the difficult terrain that is childhood.  Here the interior and exterior worlds, the magical and the mundane collide—brutally and beautifully."

—Genya Turovskaya

"In Eva Sjödin's Inner China, the imaginative life born of the desire for heaven, for somewhere else, is the starkest reminder that we reside not there, but here: on earth.  While 'heaven and dirt cave in, twist together,' the young narrator makes a life and language of the fertile and porous nature beyond her cold realities, an emotional world marked by decay and resilience.  This tale is then, also, a map of the human psyche as it maneuvers around that which threatens its body."

—E. Tracy Grinnell