MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksLends itself to breakneck reading. Many will surely delight in its recognizable tropes ... A Künstlerroman in which the protagonist obscures her identity to pursue aesthetic dreams, walking a tightrope of her own interwoven lies as she goes ... The scenes themselves are convincing but, taken together with the book’s recounting of history, they read as if Aber is out to prove something ... Nila, by contrast, seems overexplained. I found myself wishing that Aber had trusted the reader to understand her better ... If Aber errs on the side of overexplanation, let us be grateful that those explanations are (generally speaking) stunning on a sentence level ... A poets novel ... For while the book benefits from the poet’s precision, it occasionally suffers from what we might call the poet’s melodrama.
Alexandra Tanner
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksThe book was pitched as Seinfeldian—and sometimes the plot leans too far in that direction. With so few other characters given meaningful development across the novel’s 300 pages, our universe is restricted to Jules and Poppy, both of whom are prone to navel-gazing and self-sabotage ... Still, if the scope feels claustrophobic and repetitive, it is a testament to Tanner’s realism—because isn’t life as an internet addict claustrophobic and repetitive? ... The dialogue is spot-on, the anxieties real and compelling, and the prose is understated but assured. Present-tense sentences plop out at a zippy clip, until suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, Tanner lets rip a long, beautiful, multi-clauser, and the reader is left reeling under the weight of Jules’s neuroses.
