Set in New York City, poet Bush\u2019s novella follows Courtney, a teacher at a private preschool, over the course of one workday. Fresh off a \u201clight nervous breakdown,\u201d Courtney is contending with the ghosts of her past\u2014a divorce; fraught family relationships; the death of her childhood best friend\u2014while attempting to be fully engaged with her tiny students; her fellow teacher, Whitney; and Luke, a musician with whom she\u2019s beginning a new relationship. Her classroom, known as the Blue Room, becomes the north star of Courtney\u2019s life, with caretaking becoming a way to simultaneously sink into the present and become too wrung out to think about the past. Imbued with a sense of magic, the Blue Room attracts both admiration and jealousy from others at the school. As this day goes on, Courtney\u2019s relationships with fellow teachers, her students, and even herself come into sharper focus. The stream-of-consciousness narrative offers insights both mundane and profound. Bush writes about child care with affection and thoughtfulness, as well as an exhausting authenticity that lays bare the demands of this kind of relationship. Courtney doesn\u2019t shy away from her feelings of love for the children in her care. About her class, she says: \u201cI am struck by how I will remember them but they will not remember me, and it doesn\u2019t feel like a bad thing.\u201d With a mixture of awe and sorrow, she explores memory, love, grief, and the gulf between childhood and adulthood. Courtney remarks that there is something beautiful and innate that is lost in translation as we age: \u201cA child doesn\u2019t know it\u2019s a child. An adult knows it is an adult, and knows it used to be a child.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Set in New York City, poet Bush\u2019s novella follows Courtney, a teacher at a private preschool, over the course of one workday. Fresh off a \u201clight nervous breakdown,\u201d Courtney is contending with the ghosts of her past\u2014a divorce; fraught family relationships; the death of her childhood best friend\u2014while attempting to be fully engaged with her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":6685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6684","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\/6684"}],"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=6684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}