Allison is excited to be starting graduate school! She's always love the medieval period and has long wanted to be a professor. She already knows her area of specialization and she's sought out the perfect grad school with the mentor she's long wanted to work with in her field. She's rooming with her best friend, and everything looks bright. Until the first day when... her ex walks in. And not only is he in the English department in the Ph.D. program with her, he's also now saying he wants to do medieval work and is joint TA-ing the same professor she is! First, there's the bizarre factor as he never expressed an ounce of interest in any of this before, like when they were dating. But also, it sure seems like he's doing all this just to thwart Allison! I mean, why else would be suddenly be horning in on her territory and at her grad school (especially when he graduated undergrad two years ago)? She thought he was off being amazing, after winning a prestigious award when they were both at Brown (that she had also applied for--he never told her he was applying too.) But ugh, she now has to deal with him, and even sit next to him in the class they're TA-ing. Also, she's struggling in the study sessions she's leading whereas he seems to be thriving, further undermining her.
While Allison is determined to not let him affect her, she cannot stop thinking about him, even if it's in a super irritated way (in fact, toward the beginning of the book that was starting to get to be a bit much for me, although I think that's a Romance trope that just bugs me personally and I think more regular Romance readers won't be bothered at all.) But then, things start going sideways in both their personal lives, and they lean on each other in a way that is familiar and comforting. That's when the book really took off for me--when Allison's life felt less focused on hating him.
It's nice to have an academic novel that acknowledges the competition between classmates, the difficulty of new tasks like teaching, and also some of the annoying "adulting" we all have to learn in our early twenties, like letting friends go when they need to, even if it hurts. It's nice that it's not all presented as tweedy meeting of like minds who just while away entire days debating Great Literature (in fact, a fellow classmate who's a bit of a grammar nut, is made fun of by the other English grad students, which I super appreciated. We English majors are often all assumed to be Grammar Nazis--boy does that phrase need to be retired--which is not only untrue, but the more educated one is on the origins and evolution of language, the less likely one is to be strict constructionist in that area.) I loved that the area within English that Allison is studying is not super-popular or trendy. I loved that she's plus-sized and okay with that most of the time but self-conscious about it at others. The book was fun and amusing while also dealing with some real issues and treating graduate school in a realistic way.
This book is published by St. Martin's, a division of Macmillan, my employer.
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