"No one has registered the experience of a New York intellectual sensibility crashing into the culture of image quite this well since Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem."
-- John Freeman, The Seattle Times

"There's plenty about California that demands satire, and it turns out that Wilentz...has a fully operable and most engaging sense of humor."
-- Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

"Wilentz paints expert and convincing portraits. Her observations prove charming, incisive, even true."
-- Marc Porter Zasada, Los Angeles Times

"As Amy Wilentz documents in this delightful romp of a memoir, it takes true grit -- and a capacity for improvisation -- to leave the certainties of the East behind and start life all over again on the coast of dreams."
-- Kevin Starr, author of Inventing the Dream and Coast of Dreams

"Hard not to laugh.... I grew up in the Lakewood that so appalls her.... Nevertheless, I did leave as soon as I could for a big Eastern city where the women were as smart, swift, funny, and furious as Amy Wilentz."
-- John Leonard, Harper's