O'Dell once again depicts the beauty and tragedy of the working class person. Her characters are always lively and realistic. In fact, I saw some of my own brothers in the characters of Kyle and Klint (especially the line about the amount of Little Debbie snack cakes and spicy Doritos they eat). At first, I wondered about how she was going to work in the bullfighting motif because it seemed a bit of a stretch. However, she did a beautiful job tying the story of El Soltero with the lives of the coal miners that are her usual characters and the two stories complimented each other wonderfully.