[5] Nicholas Lezard of The Guardian wrote in 2016: "Eliade may be describing the life of a student in a Romanian lycée of almost a century ago, but anyone who has ever been at school, full of ideals but also too shy to speak to the opposite sex, or incapable of revising for an exam until the very last minute, will relate to this.

"[6] Sorin Alexandrescu wrote in Guernica (2016): "This ambition towards self-knowledge is what distinguishes Mircea Eliade’s novel from many others about adolescents.

While the authors of such novels usually narrate events that reveal the hero’s uncertainty with respect to himself, they do not depict the permanent self-questioning and the analysis of the mystery of identity as Mircea Eliade does.

"[7] Bryan Rennie wrote in the LA Review of Books (2016): "The novel has much to say about the development of Eliade’s views — on writing, on politics, and on religion.

[...] Moncrieff’s translation, which adopts the idiom of the old English grammar school system, lends a vaguely unreal, Harry Potter–like air to the novel, enlivening the intellectual content.