Lombardo's stories reflect the natural grace of someone who not only grew up in the city but who possesses the precise touch to express his points with honesty and art.-- Chicago Tribune

This is not fancy stuff: Small houses, a patch of green, modest dreams. Most of us could live here forever and think about nothing but what it's not. Lombardo lived here and turned his Bridgeport [neighborhood] into the stuff of lyrical, lovely art.-- Chicago Sun-Times

Billy Lombardo’s prize-winning The Logic of a Rose, is as rich and vital as Bridgeport, the blue-collar Chicago neighborhood in which these stories are set. Lombardo knows this world intimately and writes with a naturalness that makes his streetsmart surface wholly convincing, but the seeming effortlessness of his storytelling depends on a sophisticated sense of craft and a deep sense of empathy. -- Stuart Dybek

Read this to find your heart bursting into song. Such is the utter love for humanity that infuses every line, glance and gesture in this spectacularly tender collection. At the book’s core is the centrifugal force of a neighborhood, an Italian corner in Irish Bridgeport. Out of its stoops and corners, Lombardo weaves poignant stories of emigration and acculturation. With an unerring ear for the keenness of childhood, Lombardo concocts Petey Bellapani, his central narrator. Him, you’ll want to adopt. This being impossible, you take him deep and hard into your heart. -- Anne Calcagno 

Billy’s fictional recollections of Bridgeport run counter to the stereotypical descriptions of this historically political and often violent section of Chicago’s South Side.  Reading them, one rediscovers the indomitable goodness that abides within the boys (and girls and punks) on the block and the citizen-parents who watch them from their two-flat windows above. No matter what calamities and deformities mar their lives, certain principles of empathy and compassion, passed on from neighborhood old to neighborhood new, flicker in the hearts of the worst and best. The only thing better than reading these tales is hearing Billy’s voice bring them to life with the passion and authenticity of one who has lived with and understood the good people of this hardscrabble corner of the  city that works. -- Marc Smith