These stories are about death, family ties, and the pull of traditions transplanted from Scotland to a harsh New World. Reviewing MacLeod in the New York Times, Louise Erdrich wrote, "the young eventually realize that though they speak English, the old language Gaelic is internalized, that the sound and meaning of it rise to haunt them in the same way that the ancient mythologies and superstitions, spun through generations, exert an ineluctable hold".

Joyce Carol Oates gives us a precise image of the experience of reading these stories: "that sudden feeling of insecurity that comes to a traveler in unmapped country; a sense of immediacy, cinematic in its vividness".