This is fiction that shines a unique light into our common darkness. Skids is filled with brilliant, powerful, and compassionate voices. If ever I need a guide on the dark side of the moon, I want it to be Cathleen With.
-Bill Gaston
Skids is a nervy and powerful tour de force, written with wit and honesty in an entirely original voice. Unforgettable.
-Helen Humphreys
The author’s voice is original, fresh, and authentic. With inhabits her characters from the inside out, and presents them to us with a clear, unblinking gaze. These stories feel lived rather than imagined.
-Steven Beattie, Quill & Quire
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[An] impressive debut collection. . . . the stories are loosely linked by setting and some characters, which helps to underscore the anarchic drift of lives in this community of the dispossessed. We lose characters, then find them again, usually no better off — but more familiar, and more worth knowing. . . . “Drive Uncle Randy” is a road story ripe for a film deal (think Gus Van Sant or David Lynch).
– Jim Bartley, The Globe and Mail
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Cathleen With is unafraid of truth. Words spill from her pen like blood from an open wound. Skids is an irrepressible purging of stories needing to be told. But With carries a noble intention – to pay homage to the voices that she grew to love, the voices of the homeless and the disenfranchised in the heart of Vancouver’s Eastside… Raw and compassionate, this is not a book to be read cover to cover, but rather one story at a time.
– Lara Purvis, Ottawa Xpress
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Cathleen With’s debut story collection SKIDS excavates layers of pain and courage in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside . [It] has garnered excellent reviews from across the country, bringing her tales of youth in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, many of them runaways or addicts, to all Canadians.
— Elizabeth Ruth, rabble.ca
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Skids gets to the core of its characters, exposing the humanity and vulnerability in each of them. The book is not an easy read — it has violent and disturbing moments, into which the reader is drawn by With’s tightly crafted prose.
—Carra Noelle Simpson, Geist Magazine, Issue 65 (Summer 2007)
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