In discussing Aimee Bender's writing Caldwell states that "Gabriel García Márquez once famously explained the credibility of magical realism by referring to the priest in "One Hundred Years of Solitude" who levitates each time he drinks a cup of hot chocolate: it's the chocolate, García Márquez said, that makes the levitation real. In Bender's world, the opposite holds true: her scaffoldings of unreality are there to hold the humanity within the story."