Nick Lezard's choice, The Guardian

'. . .playful, ludicrous and very good teen journal, in English for the first time'

'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. As will anyone who has ever committed their private thoughts to paper, as the true record of their soul and a rebuke to posterity.'

"The power of Diary is that, while not being a novel unique to Romania, it can be read as metonymous of it. . . For all its boyish, slapdash sentiments, this is a refined piece of work."

Alexander Clapp, TLS

". . . Istros Books publication of Diary of a Short-Sighted Adolescent, now the eighth of Eliade's novels in English, marks a turn of the tide.. . 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."

Bryan Rennie, LA Review of Books