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It’s clear that something strange is afoot in Munson, the fictional Florida hamlet where Frances Johnson takes place. A volcano seethes on the outskirts of town, strange animals skitter in the shadows, and a dense brown fog has settled overhead. Pets and people vanish. Unfurling over a period of days leading up to the town’s annual dance, the story follows Frances’s mounting restlessness, as she must decide whether to take control of her life or cede it to the murky future the community has designated for her. Though the novel hinges on a familiar plot point—will Frances remain in Munson, or escape to the world at large?—it’s the only trace of convention to be found in this hypnotic book, which transforms its setting into a tableau of exotic menace.—Time Out New York

This is a comedy of manners, and there is an inkling of Austen in Levine’s delicate and deadpan assault on our culture’s heterosexist, heterogeneous dictates. But the feel of the novel is more fanciful than programmatic. Each sentence operates in the same manner as the overarching narrative: shifting shape, defying expectation.—The Believer

Levine’s work is, at least technically, “surreal,” but like much of the best writing that maps the borders between dreams and conscious life, its subtle disjunctions create a zone that often feels more real than “reality” itself . . . If it feels like we’ve been here before, underneath this dance floor, gazing up at the townsfolk above, it is not because we’ve seen this landscape in other fictions, but maybe in a half-remembered dream.—San Francisco Bay Guardian