"In the game of American-life-on-the-go hopscotch, Ali Liebegott's heroine Theo just jumped a square ahead of Dean Moriarty. Dean's neverending  hustle that energized the existentially desperate young of the 50s, has pretty much gone mainstream. Pills, booze, drunken sex, pick-your-own-reality-TV, and brushes with a fairly humanized welfare system, have despirited the young now even more. At least Kerouac's dharma bums had their anger at the injustices of criminalized homosexuality, illegal drugs, and institutionalized racism, to fuel them. It is now half a century later, and Theo's charming innocence is fully invested in a system that's made freedom just another game. She's a lesbian, but it's no big deal, because she's in every other way, a young urban American desperado. She is also a gambler who excels in the understanding of this royal addiction, which she is trying to kick along with cigarettes, booze, and bars, all legal now. The author's fine writing about gambling is as good as I ever read, including Dostoevski's and the Barthelme Bros. In the end, love, in whatever twisted, pallid form, a love that has little to do with sexuality, is the only answer. In the Fifties as Now there is no other solution for the young. "Suicide and murder/but that's dumb," Ted Berrigan said. Theo and her (maybe) girlfriend, consider both. They come up with the old Beatles song. Wonderful book."

—Andrei Codrescu, author of So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems