A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD NOMINEE, 09 Jan 2006
This deserving novel has recenlty been nominated for a prestigious PEN Faulkner Award. It is rendered with unusual sensory and emotional sensitivities, portraying a lost world beautifully painted amidst a story about a young woman's sexual awakening. Highly recommended

Beautiful and Riveting, 28 Dec 2005
"I enjoyed Leora Skolkin-Smith's powerful debut novel "Edges" very much. It's a deeply felt and authentic book written in lyrical and compelling language, telling a universal story about mothers and daughters. The geography of Israel is especially memorable and Leora Skolkin-Smith is very gifted at expressing complex emotional moments, and a young woman's emerging sexuality.

Beautifully written, 27 Dec 2005
I enjoyed Leora Skolkin-Smith's powerful debut novel "Edges" very much. It's a deeply felt and authentic book written in lyrical and compelling language, telling a universal story about mothers and daughters. The geography of Israel is especially memorable and Leora Skolkin-Smith is very gifted at expressing complex emotional moments, and a young woman's emerging sexuality.

Exceptional, 06 Nov 2005
I was enjoying it so much that I didn't want it to end. It is beautiful - so honed, and beautifully composed. It's the book that anyone would want to be able to write. Because I can see the work in it - the toil - and of course it comes out as an easy read for me the reader - it just glides in there -

Metaphorical and Beautiful, 20 Sep 2005
Bonna Stovall (Massachusetts) - See all my reviews
Leora Skolkin-Smith's "Edges" shouts metaphorically. When her father suicides, fourteen-year old Liana leaves her protected (if torturous) N.Y. suburb with her mother...and sails right into our world. An edgy world of tense borders, barbed wire. A world where soldiers and children are endangered species. In the mother;s old home in Jerusalem the family lingers around the traditional Friday evening meal. Liana watches this marooned island of love and civility, each one damaged in their own way--an uncle with a stump where there had been a leg, the mother giggly with memories of runnng bullets in her bras and and panties when she was fourteen.
"Edges" has been called a coming-of-age novel. But I consider it not just as the struggle of one fourteen year old's girl for identity but the artist's stuggle to comes to grips with gender and violence. Skolkin-Smith offers us something human and whole: fourteen year old Liana leaving the dense-with-war Jeurusalem to make of its dangerous borders a glade, the forest primeval, the Mediterranean-flicked hillside of her own "personal". She soon learns that she is her own country,