Yvonne Daley’s Octavia Boulevard, for my money, ranks right up there with Angela’s Ashes and Eat, Pray, Love. From Chinatown to Haight-Ashbury, Daley brings San Francisco to life in literature as no one has since the Beat Poets. Best of all is the marvelous apartment house on Octavia Boulevard, the “microcosm” and “small village” where Daley lived for several years with Wisdom Man, Stretch, Noel, Robin, Ann, Alexandra and a host of other unforgettable friends and neighbors, all of whom poured out their good hearts to this splendid writer. In the end, Octavia Boulevard is a story about community, family, friendship, and, in all its wondrous forms, love.
~ Howard Frank Mosher, author of Disappearances, Stranger in the Kingdom, The Fall of the Year.
Yvonne Daley is the only writer in America who could have drawn such an illuminating portrait of San Francisco in the Awful Age of Bush. She is the sharp-eyed and patient listener who’s caught the soul of this remarkable city and its most resilient citizens. What Daley tracks in these pages is how and why America began dreaming of Obama long before it knew who he was. Octavia Boulevard may break your heart, but it also offers some street-smart hope.
~ David Huddle, The Story of a Million Years, La Tour Dreams of the Wolf Girl, Tenorman, Glory Days.
Octavia Boulevard is a microcosm of San Francisco, San Francisco a paradigm of cities. Octavia Boulevard offers a reader experience of the plenitude and disorder that is humanity’s creation (ex nihilo, in its own image) of the urban planet with its joyous and disturbing interpenetration of pains and pleasures trying to fill the endlessly unfulfillable gut of human hungers.
~ Tom Smith, Spending the Light, Jack’s Beans: A Five-Year Diary, A Very Good Boy.