Winner Minnesota Book Award
Winner Michigan Award for Literary Fiction
Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers  

"With character studies reminiscent of James Baldwin's masterwork Go Tell It on the Mountain, O'Connor suffuses her imagined world with such feeling that readers live the pages more than read them. A flawlessly nuanced work of fiction with a steadily increasing intensity, Where No Gods Came is a brilliant work of storytelling..." — The Barnes & Noble Review Discover Great New Writers

"A sensitive, often disquieting book that rings true throughout. . . . It's the skill of an accomplished writer that we see Faina's extraordinary spirit, while simultaneously experiencing her pain and despair. The end result is an uplifting, even inspiring book without any of the sugarcoating often found in stories like this." — California Literary Review

"...a touching odyssey of a girl poised between the emotional abyss and the reader's heart." — Minneapolis Star and Tribune

"Written with precision and perception, this is a highly recommended work from a writer to watch." — Library Journal

"...a fresh and moving coming-of-age novel, a memorable portrait of the artist a scrawny young girl...Faina is a fairy-tale heroine, the dark haired younger sister exiled in an alien land, unwanted, dressed in her sister's discarded granny gowns and cracked-vinyl boots, consigned not to sweeping cinders exactly but to scrubbing her mother's puke in a dingy apartment. If Where No Gods Came is a kind of fairy tale, it's the real thing, as told by Grimm not Disney, full of real menace, sharp edges and rough corners, strangeness and, ultimately, the possibility of grace. It's a story about the power of love and guts and imagination to sustain a skinny kid in a hard world." — Buffalo News

"The various voices ring true. Ms. O'Connor writes of family and love and loss and youth at risk and hard-earned pleasure; she does so with a noticing eye and tone-perfect ear. Her sense of the landscape here described—both actual and metaphorical—is keen, and her language self-assured. This is a fine, fierce book." — Nicholas Delbanco; Michigan Literary Award Judge; In the Name of Mercy; Old Scores; What Remains

"Above all Where No Gods Came is a novel about resiliency and hope; that at the end of all the darkness, personal courage and trust prevail; that grace is a story of transcendence, in whatever limited human form it may take; and that for every Faina of our world, there are a hundred more—girls of fierce intelligence and determination stuck in unfortunate circumstances. It is a story for our time."— Three Candles, Steve Mueske, Editor

"Fervent and despairing and truth-hard, this novel kept me spellbound, hurtling toward a hoped-for redemption." — Susan Straight, Highwire Moon

"In Where No Gods Came, Sheila O'Connor fearlessly takes us inside a family long past the breaking point, reminding us of the power of love, the pain of separation, and introducing me to one of the most compelling young women I've met in a long time. Resilient, vulnerable and with a heart as big as they come, Faina McCoy will break your heart. I didn't want her story to end." — David Haynes, All American Dream Dolls; Live at Five; Somebody Else's Mama

"Sheila O'Connor's beautifully readable novel about young girls living close to the precipice is truthful, tough and filled with delicate hope. She shows how we all survive by inches, by grace." — Maureen Gibbon, Paris Red

"This is a beautifully written story about the ways in which people find the strength to move on—physically, emotionally and spiritually. Long after the last page is turned, you’ll find yourself thinking about the people who have graced them. Faina’s strength stays with me." — Jacqueline Woodson