Andree Connors has written a novel so precise and powerful, as an image, that it will help us create a whole new anthropological view of ourselves. Amateur People is one of those terrifying mirrors made of bone; a novel with no one home but the reader and no choice for the reader but to admit it. We are the Amateur People, and while for most writers that would be our plight, for Connors it's a solution - she's that tough; and her novel goes a long ways toward making it possible for us to be that tough too. This is a book capable of making us change the ways we like to think of ourselves.