A thoughtful, funny, and touching campus novel.
In Bailey’s novel, an academic, fresh out of graduate school and plagued by self-doubt, begins a new job in a sleepy rural town as a lowly adjunct at a junior college.
After Eliot Becker finishes his English language and literature doctorate, he enters the collegiate job market with elation, but after a battery of rejections, that “glow [has] faded.” He finally lands a teaching position, but it’s not as prestigious as he would have liked; he’s an adjunct lecturer teaching one course in remedial composition at Eastern Tech, an unheralded community college. He moves to the rural town of Freeland—home to five bars, five churches, and two grain elevators—and finds an unassuming apartment above a drug store; to make ends meet, he bags groceries part-time. Despite his initial disappointment, Eliot becomes attached to his students and invested in their situations. For example, Donna, a married 30-year-old with two kids and an abusive husband, attends school in search of an elusive spark that her everyday life no longer provides, and Bailey movingly captures her excitement: “In class she is awake and alive.” However, Eliot begins to questions whether he can settle down and make a life in Freeland. Although he vies for a full-time position, his girlfriend, Merce, who still lives a few hours away in Detroit, refuses to join him. Throughout the novel, Bailey’s portrayal of the coziness and claustrophobia of small-town life, as well as the peculiar affronts of academia, is pitch perfect and often rendered with enjoyably droll humor. Also, the author affectingly details the 20-something Eliot’s desire to put down roots, connecting it to the fact that his father is deceased and his mother is away on a round-the-world cruise. (As he says to Merce at one point, “I need to be somewhere.”) Overall, it’s a marvelously engrossing read.
A thoughtful, funny, and touching campus novel.Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9798985000443
Page Count: 260
Publisher: A Legacy Project
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
I Who Have Never Known Men ($22.00; May 1997; 224 pp.; 1-888363-43-6): In this futuristic fantasy (which is immediately reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale), the nameless narrator passes from her adolescent captivity among women who are kept in underground cages following some unspecified global catastrophe, to a life as, apparently, the last woman on earth. The material is stretched thin, but Harpman's eye for detail and command of tone (effectively translated from the French original) give powerful credibility to her portrayal of a human tabula rasa gradually acquiring a fragmentary comprehension of the phenomena of life and loving, and a moving plangency to her muted cri de coeur (``I am the sterile offspring of a race about which I know nothing, not even whether it has become extinct'').
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-888363-43-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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