Let's get the obvious out of the way: this is badly written. The dialogue flails somewhere between soap opera and tumblr post, and the plot is so badly paced that I'm pretty sure it never saw an outline, much less a storyboard. The thing that really got me, though, was that every new situation we arrived in took less than a page to convince me that the author had not only never experienced it, but perhaps had never even taken a second to think about whatever he was talking about. Considering that many of these have to have been things that this guy has, in fact, experienced, I have to assume it's a skill issue—he is somehow completely unable to portray them with any believability—rather than a lack of knowledge. I'm left, somehow, with the impression that someone with several degrees, including one from CUNY, has neither ever been in a classroom, nor in New York City: They went from Manhattan to Brooklyn and back three times in a single day? Also, on a personally annoyed note, as if that's not what the rest of this review is, the main character appears to be Jewish on-and-off, only when there's a line that needs to be filled with the most obvious possible piece of family backstory (You changed your name at Ellis island? No way! Actually, now that I've written that, it seems like a good point by which to judge the rest of the novel. No names were actually changed at Ellis Island. You can learn this by googling "were names actually changed at Ellis Island?" No part of this novel seems to have been given more thought than what might have been speech-to-text-ed in a notes app.