Publishers Weekly
Munson’s funny, stoner-friendly debut follows high school senior Addison Schacht as he stumbles through the Washington, D.C., teenage underworld to investigate a classmate’s unsolved murder. Schacht—a small-time pot dealer, consummate anti-social, and Jewish collector of Holocaust jokes—makes for a poor but entertaining detective, and when he places a stoned phone call to his prime suspect, Addison and his friends become caught up in the mystery he set out to solve. As Addison’s sleuthing begins to unravel and his life crumbles along with it, his ramblings offer an interesting counter to, and often context for, his misguided attempt to discover the truth. Munson keeps things lightly dark, though his weakness for wandering asides—Addison is just as likely to riff on the Aeneid, Latin syntax, or his favorite movies as he is to discuss his investigation and efforts to outsmart the police—trips up the pace, even if they are what one would expect from a self-absorbed adolescent. The plotting could use some work, but Munson nails the voice. (Apr.)
Library Journal
Set in Washington, DC, in the late 1990s, this novel answers a college application question: "What are your best and worst qualities?" Given the psychological complexity of its writer, the gifted and disaffected high schooler Addison Schacht, the answer is extensive. A small-time drug dealer and advanced Latin student (he's a devotee of Virgil's Aeneid), Addison is also involved in a "nonrelationship" with the equally gifted but more levelheaded Phoebe "Digger" Zeleny. After the murder of classmate Kevin Broadus, a kid he barely knew, Addison becomes obsessed with solving the murder mystery. When he hears a rumor of an alleged perpetrator, he embarks, along with Digger, on a reckless quest to bring him to justice. VERDICT First novelist Munson, an online editor at Commentary, takes the young, alienated hero/antihero trope à la Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield in a decidedly contemporary direction. However, Addison's negativity and detachment make him less engaging than his spiritual predecessors, and overall the novel is not entirely successful.—Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA
Kirkus Reviews
High-school student with dreams of collegiate glory investigates the murder of a classmate. Debut novelist Munson combines a classic sense of adolescent alienation and a keen comedic voice to depict a bleakly funny teenage wasteland in the wilds of the District of Columbia. The book is structured around the college essay question of one Addison Schacht, a smart 18-year-old high-school senior who supplements the dreary monotony of life in an upper-middle-class D.C. suburb with a sideline selling marijuana to his equally well-off classmates. But Addison fully intends to surpass his peers with a meteoric rise to academic greatness-as a classics major, no less. His only real comrade in his delusional struggle is best friend and soul mate Phoebe "Digger" Zeleny, a funny, sly young woman Addison repeatedly declares is not his girlfriend by any stretch of the imagination. The crime to which our hero devotes himself is the startling death of his classmate Kevin Broadus, gunned down in a coffee shop near the Potomac. Two others were also killed, but the murderer took the time to pump a dozen bullets into Kevin. "You had to figure all the extra bullets . . . meant something," Addison says. Echoes of James Fuerst's Huge (2009) and the 2005 film Brick abound, but deft comic timing and a caustic, ambitious protagonist make this a perfectly valid entry in the teen noir subgenre.
