"You Can Make Him Like You is, I think, the book High Fidelity could've been, wanted to be."
--Nik Korpon reviews at The Nervous Breakdown
"Tanzer comes exceedingly close to a perfect capture of life’s asymptotes, with help from the Hold Steady..."
--NewPages
"You Can Make Him Like You is Tanzer’s best work yet, and I expect that it will propel him onto his largest stage to date."
--Baby Got Books
"You’ll cut through this novel quickly, which is a compliment to the writer — there are few if any sentences out of place, and the narrative moments are strung together in a manageable, lean sort of way."
--Matty Byloos reviews at Small Doggies
"...this coming-of-age story for late bloomers offers an erratic yet touching glimpse of marriage and fatherhood."
--Time Out Chicago
"Ben Tanzer’s work reads like a series of precisely delivered suckerpunches, leaving me shucked against the floor disoriented, hurting, bleeding, but wanting more, always more."
--Lavinia Ludlow reviews at Small Press Reviews
"Tanzer, in a manner most mysterious to me, somehow harnesses the power of straight, conventional writing without the usual level of pandering or expositional obtuseness."
--JA Tyler reviews at Red Fez
"This is what an "adult" coming of age story would look like, if there ever was such a thing. A big, long, sloppy, wet kiss goodbye to what they used to know, and a timid and frightening hello to unknown, and sometimes unbelievable, new territory."
--Lori Hettler reviews at The Next Best Book Club
"This is one of the best, if not the best, depictions of the transition from empty childlessness to fatherhood I’ve ever had the opportunity to experience. Tanzer has succeeded in imbuing every interaction, every situation, every political pot-shot with the metaphorical acceptance of fatherhood."
--Caleb J. Ross reviews at Outsider Writers
"This is a honest look at the process every father goes through on some level."
--Jason Behrends reviews at Chicago Subtext
"Tanzer’s love of writing pop stories, that reveling in what can be new and poignant in oft-tread ground, wins the day. His greatest skill — and it’s been this way through all of his novels and short stories — is to take the normal, the everyday we all know and live through, and to turn that into great tragicomedy"
--Ken Wohlrob
"What makes the book work so well is the way that Tanzer writes his characters, particularly Keith, with incredibly depth and honesty."
--Amber Sparks reviews at Vouched Books