I got this for my birthday and all I can say is that if this guy is a product of both Harvard and Yale and a contributor to the New York Times, Time Out New York and Salon (as the book jacket boasts), it sure doesn't show in the writing.Grossman takes a mildly interesting -- if precious and pretentious -- premise and drains all the fun out of it with tepid, by-the-numbers writing and boring, off-the-rack characters. Even as an attempt at slumming with a mass market genre novel in order to make a quick, cynical buck this book fails.A snooze and a bore with a dissapointing ending (you know where he wanted to go, but he just didn't have the writely chops to pull it off).Maybe Grossman should've tried Princeton?