Tesserae: A Memoir of Two Summers stands above much of the crowd in its commitment to ask, ‘What is it to remember?’ Mathias B. Freese, tenderly plaiting a web that spreads from Woodstock, Las Vegas, Long Island, and North Carolina, locates friends and family, lovers long since gone, desire and passion sometimes quenched sometimes unrequited, and the harrowing agony that comes from that most soul-crushing word of all, regret. But Tesserae is not a work of sadness and grief. Rather, it is an effort from a trained psychotherapist adept at understanding the feelings that we all have. The quiescence found has a staying effect upon the mind; this memoir lingers in the reader’s memory for some time. – Steven Berndt, Professor of American Literature, College of Southern Nevada