[1] Set primarily in a location known as Pebble Town, it follows the misadventures of a group of loosely related characters that seem to be wandering in and out of each other's dreams.

"[8] Amanda DeMarco wrote, "At the sentence level, [Frontier] is a wonderful, carefully hewn thing, lucid and pure".

Even if the actual events can be hard to parse, Can Xue’s powerful imagery will flood the senses and immerse readers in this magical world.

"[10] Amal El-Mohtar described the book as one of precise subtlety and praised the translation, but wrote, "Patterns recur, but to track them or expect them to lead to something is a mistake."

She seconded the view of Porochista Khakpour in the introduction that "the book seems pleasurably to lengthen as we read it"; El-Mohtar concluded that "like Dubuffet's [Shot in the Wing], the more you look, the more you see, and the harder it is to speak of what you see to someone who isn't also looking.