"Brinig's novel is the great modernist fantasy of Los Angeles . . . although it is essentially unread today."
- David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2011
"A most unusual book-one that is wholly mad in places, savage and caustic in other places, and here and there set off with a wild and moving beauty."
- Bruce Catton, Newspaper Enterprise Association, October 12, 1933
"No American author has done anything quite like it, and at first glance one scarcely knows quite what to make of it. . . . A brilliantly bizarre tale, a sort of literary nightmare, quite fascinating through its very strangeness."
- Galveston Daily News, October 8, 1933
"It is both realistic and romantic, poetic and prosaic, ironical and beautiful, satirical and naive-but always decadent."
- The (Raleigh) News & Observer, October 22, 1933
"The strangest novel to come out of the territory . . . a novel not set in Hollywood or dealing with the making of movies, but saturated with every fantasy and dream associated with the region."
- David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction, 2000