“Toronto-based Lisa Pasold's debut novel is as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker. Pasold weaves together themes of love, chance, magic and fortune to create a compelling coming-of-age story set against the gambling scene in Depression-era Vancouver and Bugsy Siegal-era Las Vegas. Rats of Las Vegas is charming, original, and rich in historical detail.”
"Millard Lacouvy, the first-person narrator and main protagonist of Torontonian Lisa Pasold's engrossing first novel...is one of the feistiest young women in recent Canadian fiction."
"Rats of Las Vegas is first and foremost a good yarn about a solitary woman asserting herself in a man's world--not through glamour or sex but through sheer wits and determination."
“Critical, darkly funny and painstakingly lyrical."
“Pasold sneaks in mind's-eye metaphors and images, the poems carefully structured and solid, belying their driving narrative – she weaves disjointed memories, from rusty jeeps to lust to typewriter. A thrilling, amazing work.”
“Pasold offers one heck of a wild read."
“As if we’re reading notes scribbled by this expatriate freelance writer in a car bouncing along a dirt road in Kenya, or on a late-night intercontinental flight…Pasold’s work is the poetic equivalent of living out of a suitcase.”
"Weave is quite simply a masterpiece: there is more in these eighty odd pages than in most novels."
"Pasold’s ability to capture the personal, the political and societal expectations of an era is impressive; the narrator telling stories “on an aeroplane or in a train compartment, as if we are hurtling / through a tunnel and / neither of us knows what is on the other side."
"The book fascinates on both narrative and lyric levels. Pasold never confuses feeling with sentiment, and she has a gift for memorable images which work together to form a poetic vocabulary … This book’s a keeper, one you’ll reread and read aloud."