Sam is in her early 30s, two years out of her English and Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, and, like many of her cohort, barely scraping by as an adjunct. When she lands a spot at Rosedale, an elite private college, as a last-minute replacement for an older professor, her problems seem temporarily solved. Sam is optimistic, even if her schedule is grueling and her salary minuscule; even if the classes she\u2019s teaching\u2014The Masculine Voice and The Campus Novel\u2014are barely veiled attacks on the #MeToo movement; even if the person who hires her says, \u201cI just need a live body.\u201d Then, on her first day, Sam runs into another recent hire: Tom Sternberg, her grad-school adviser, with whom she\u2019d had a complexly intimate relationship. Sam discovers Tom\u2019s long-awaited new novel centers around an older professor \u201creckoning with his checkered past\u201d as the \u201cfeminist movement sweep[ing] the nation\u201d emboldens a bitter former student to publicize their affair. The premise sounds familiar to Sam, as does the female antagonist\u2014and she certainly sounds familiar to Sam\u2019s grad-school classmates, who close ranks against her. Reeling under Tom\u2019s repurposing of their shared history as a springboard back into relevance, and stung by reviews lauding the book as \u201cfiercely honest,\u201d Sam begins a downward spiral that gains speed as she nears rock bottom. The harsh realities of Sam\u2019s exploitation by systems that were meant to both educate and employ her are leavened by the character\u2019s wry humor; however, the novel suffers at times from a reliance on expository info-dumps to underscore its critique of higher education\u2019s abuses, which are more effectively explored in-scene. Regardless, this expos\u00e9 of academia from the perspective of its most vulnerable residents offers a vital message at a time when it\u2019s easy to forget what\u2019s supposed to be at the center of all institutions: people\u2014messy, unpredictable, and filled with fragile hope.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Sam is in her early 30s, two years out of her English and Comparative Literature Ph.D. program, and, like many of her cohort, barely scraping by as an adjunct. When she lands a spot at Rosedale, an elite private college, as a last-minute replacement for an older professor, her problems seem temporarily solved. Sam is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5949,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5948"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5948\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5949"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}