Langer is as good a prop master as the one for Netflix’s Stranger Things, judiciously peppering his pages with relics from the past like Styrofoam containers from McDonald’s, Walkmans, overcooked lamb chops and references to Mariel Hemingway. Though The Breakfast Club came a little later, Gen Xers might also flash on that movie’s stereotyped teenagers locked in detention: Here, too, we have a jock, a pretty princess and a few troubled misfits ... Keeping track of who’s who in Cyclorama, and who’s playing whom onstage in The Diary of Anne Frank, can get a little homework-y ... have this year’s novelists all gotten a memo from their editors to include a scene of police brutality or racism? ... But Langer’s flip forward to 2016 is the literary equivalent of a Mary Lou Retton tumbling pass ... a scrim of slapstick something far more haunting and serious.
... an often funny, slightly messy but mostly deeply moving novel about the ways unresolved trauma affects the life choices we make, including the paths we take in our careers, the partners we choose and the politics we support. It's also a novel about how the bonds of friendship can transcend adolescent vulnerabilities and motivate us to work for change. Langer treats these teenage upheavals with a light hand, and though the novel occasionally takes some shortcuts in character development, the results are generous to its flawed cast ... Langer's novel reveals how the past echoes through the present and continues to shape our futures.
... [a] zestfully portrayed and irresistible cast ... [a] fast-paced novel of appalling behavior, bad choices, and floundering attempts at redemption. After two entertaining, biblio-themed mysteries, Chicagoan Langer returns to his home turf and gift for creating intricate and resonant ensembles ... Langer’s cycloramic tale of dirty tricks, moral reasoning, and learning to love is smart, captivating, funny, appalling, and tender.
... inventive ... The novel handles Tyrus’s abuses of power in thrilling and unexpected ways, but even more captivating is how Langer uses the story of Anne Frank to magnify cultural, political, and personal conflicts ... Readers will applaud Langer’s outstanding performance.
... an ambitious novel that reminds readers that the social and political seeds of Nazism have not been obliterated ... A somber warning about the insidious consequences of hatred.
With storytelling bravura, Mr. Langer alternates among the points of view of his characters. Though all are diverse in background, they share, with the author, an inclination toward scenery chewing. Everything is exaggerated in this book, whether it’s the gestures or the accents (one character speaks in jive; another in an unbearable Cockney-Aussie hybrid). The dialogue is often overtly scripted...There’s nothing wrong with this kind of shtick, but you wonder what Anne Frank ever did to get roped into it ... Topics like the #MeToo movement, illegal immigration and even the changing media landscape are rapidly incorporated into the dramas. As in all Trump-era fiction, the lessons of this novel rely on the assumption of a shared (liberal, suburban) politics, turning a hammy but outsized story into something extremely generic.
