As consciously and effectively as a short novel, Promise Supermarket depicts the life of a family moving ever downward, from a house on a hill to a one-room cellar apartment. One of the marvels of this book is that Elizabeth Quinlan is able to depict the immense difficulties of her childhood with both quiet understatement and clear detail, allowing us to share her experience with the deep involvement that fully inhabiting a new literary space, however bleak, may give. The magic of Promise Supermarket is to turn the power of visual imagination and memory into unforgettable stories-to "grow treasures" out of what was planted in the treeless ground of a difficult but tenderly remembered childhood. -Martha Collins, from the foreword.