"It isn't easy being an adolescent girl in Anna Gaskell's world. If you aren't drowning in a lake, you're being taunted, teased or chased, and to add insult to injury, the surroundings are so pretty you just want to cry.... [Gaskell's] flair for color and composition, to say nothing of her ability to capture the metaphoric tortures of growing up as if they were flesh-and-blood facts, survives intact." —Art & Auction

"...dramatic outdoor scenes of strange goings-on among underage doppelgangers, women who seem to be nurses and other characters. Displaying a visual intelligence and a literary sensibility, she combines a riveting palette, amazing light effects and constantly changing print formats." —Town & Country

"The first monograph by the young fine-art phenom from Yale, this rich volume includes Gaskell's 'Wonder' photographs—playful and disturbing allegories about a young girl's coming of age loosely based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland." —American Photo

"Anna Gaskell's photographsoften have the quality of narrative cliff-hangers....Gaskell's luscious prints, with their skewed perspectives, eerie light effects and artificial elements—fake clouds and such—make viewers eager to see the next frame and then the next, hoping for one that will make clear what is going on. None ever does. Gaskell's scenes can leave you anxious and uneasy. Somrthing is happening, and you can't quite make out what is amiss. these prints are unsettling in a way that recalls novels such as Wuthering Heights. Isolated from a context and conveying a sense of urgency...these prints engender moods you don't experience in a darkened movie house. Gaskell pictures the unfathomable." —Art in America

"...her images are so perfectly self-contained, language struggles to translate their multi-layered impact.... the photographs have the intimacy of personal tresures, secret traumas, and supressed emotions. As this collection of seven of Gaskell's series confirms, she is among contemporary photography's most skilled and philosophical exponents, and her images are as visually enchanting as they are psychologically complex." —Contemporary

"Visually stimulating and full of literary and archetypal cues, Anna Gaskell's photographs are as sensual and evocative as photography gets....challenging, beautiful, and sometimes disturbing." —Picture

"Des Monies native Anna Gaskell's work, dark photographic depictions of young females in mind-bendingly evocative situations, has been the talk of critics from Des Moines to New York to London.... Her self-described 'melodramatic' work fills the 155 pages of the book, along with a short story by Thom Jones, winner of the O. Henry literary award." —Des Moines Register

"Her images frequently allude to others' earlier work, whether it be Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or Cindy Sherman's assumed identities, while mimicking the feel of fashion photography." —The Art Newspaper

"Anna Gaskell's beautiful nymphs are no heavenly creatures. They might be possessed, like Stephen King's most famous witch, Carrie. They might be hurt or perverted. they might not even be there.... Anna Gaskell's enchanted aesthetic embodies America's nightmare: it's sacred children deflowered, rotting, and threatening." —Jalouse

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