New York Observer thinks Amy is "radiant"

Secret Society Girl succeeds all the same. Ms. Peterfreund’s descriptions of the ambitious Amy Haskel’s collegial life are both vivid and amusing, and although the second half of the book focuses too much on her secret society’s rather dull battle for women’s rights, Amy herself is charming enough to be forgiven. Her ceremonial initiation into Rose & Grave—modeled after Yale’s famous Skull and Bones—runs a little long, but Amy handles it with dignity and spunk, even as the boys in the club pretend to drown her inside a coffin and threaten to make her a sex slave in their castle.

Amy’s story is both witty and endearing, peppered as it is with rhetorical questions and moments when she emphatically addresses the reader as “dude.” As she discusses her dorm-room drama, her study sessions at the library, and the awkward interactions she shares at the lit-mag office with her “friend with bennies,” Amy proves herself a rather appealing girl. She constantly makes lists to better sort through her thoughts (“WAYS TO KNOW WITHOUT ROLLING OVER TO LOOK AT HIM,” from the chapter “Morning After”; “THINGS I DISCOVERED THAT CALMED ME DOWN,” from “Barbarians”), and she’s as forward about her desires and goals as she is about her disappointments. She’s tough, too: “Show me a pining man and I’ll show you a pussy,” she says in reference to a boy who’s just told her that he loves her. To top it off, Amy knows about Said and Lévi-Strauss, and although she spends most of Secret Society Girl finding her place in Rose & Grave, we learn that during her sophomore year, she tried to read Borges in Spanish.