Praise & Reviews

Second Language

“The situations of Ronna Wineberg’s characters are diverse, but they circle one inescapable theme with flawless emotional accuracy: that few are fulfilled, and even fewer will live out their lives without at least trying, bravely, to make a break for it.”—Rosellen Brown

“Reading the stories in Second Language is like entering a series of complex, absorbing worlds…This is a beautifully written and deeply satisfying collection.”—Margot Livesey

"A strong collection of thirteen short stories, this book is a quest into beautiful prose and insight. Powerful language passes throughout, proving Wineberg to be a wonderful storyteller. The central theme of the book is people looking for their escape, but it is in the individual stories that reveal Wineberg’s real talent, each showing a unique world, giving the overall work a resonating tone. Lines like: ‘A good piano can transport you. Not from her to there. But in your mind,’ are peppered throughout the work, like little seeds that sprout and grow. Initially, coming across as deceptively simple, Wineberg’s metaphors are anything but simple and ordinary.”—Eric Hoffer Award for Books

“Wineberg’s characters are reflective, pensive, torn between what feels right and what feels good. Each woman encounters a troubling path; an ill parent, a decaying marriage, a furious child…Throughout the collection, whether they are standing before their lovers or their spouses, their parents or their doctors, the women in Second Language find that they are able to cope with the seemingly unbearable, and that their instinct and intellect will give them the words.”—Jaclyn Thomas, Small Spiral Notebook

“Revisiting the snippets I had highlighted in the collection Second Language, I was struck by their ability to elicit gut-level emotional responses all on their own; as if these soulful epigrams had become wrapped up in their respective stories only by chance.”—Steven Hansen, Small Spiral Notebook

“The following comments by Cynthia Ozick about writers and their work (Metaphor and Memory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989, p. 266) captures precisely the powerful stories in Wineberg’s provocative book: 

the writer is an imaginer by trade, will suggest a course of connection, of entering the tremulous spirit of the helpless, the fearful, the apart. The writer will demonstrate the contagion of passion and compassion that is known in medicine as empathy and in art as insight.

It is exactly what Ronna Wineberg does as a writer.”—Lois LaCivita Nixon, Literature Arts Medicine Database

Review of “A Crossing,” Lois LaCivita Nixon, Medical Ethics and Humanities

“In this collection of beautifully crafted short stories, Ronna Wineberg deals with unfulfilled longings, deeply-held secrets, the effects on aging on the mind and the body.”—Jewish Book Council

“Ronna Wineberg does a wonderful job of showing all her characters fully in the world they inhabit, writing almost in real time of the pain that walks hand in hand with beauty and joy. All of her characters make leaps and are awkward from time to time, and all of them come to a realization of how they want to live their life. At the heart of it all, Second Language is a collection of stories about how women free themselves.”— Kelly Zavala, Other Voices

“The judges named Ronna Wineberg runner-up for her short story collection Second Language.”— Union for Reform Judaism