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A review by gabsalott13
Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
3.0
Meme Corner: today’s memes reflect the two-step process through which Jason Fitger continually chooses violence.
This was genuinely funny to me, as I love cringing my way through stories of self-sabotage. Anyone who’s in this round of school/job applications will shudder to think of what it’d be like to have a recommender like Jason Fitger, Yelp aficionado and yet-holding-on professor in an underfunded English department.
Pros: As someone who constantly sidetracks in everything I write, I cracked up reading these letters that began as a simple recommendation for a student, and morphed into so much more. The rote misery of the recommender is clear in his meandering paragraphs, but also in his description of the last-minute requests of many students, and even the salutations. On the whole, I was really impressed by Julie Schumacher’s commitment to the epistolary form and the various nuggets of information it can store.
Cons: The one place where I don’t think the one-sided letters aged well is with Fitger’s exes. It seems like he’s stalking them until halfway through the book, where you realize their presumed “radio silence” is mostly due to Fitger never getting to the point of things, which means he fails to mention their consensual meetings and discussions until the middle letters. Since we are left to rely on his roundabout description of events, it takes too long to establish that he’s just really annoying. This isn’t an egregious misstep on the part of the author, but in a time where people are airing the many abuses of power in academia, it doesn’t hold up the best. Also, I lost steam about halfway through, which is to say that I think this book didn’t need about 25% of the letters to reach its mark. Finally, I wish I could say that the plot twist at the end was a chilling reminder of the dire consequences of universities’ exploitation of their employees and students. Instead, it came across as a drastic tonal shift that wrapped up this novel in an unearned bow.
Final rating: 3 stars, which in this case, means I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this book, but if you’re already interested, I wouldn’t discourage you from reading it, either.
TW (and spoiler)
.
.
.
.
Discussion (without graphic depiction) of a character’s suicide in the last 20 pages.
This was genuinely funny to me, as I love cringing my way through stories of self-sabotage. Anyone who’s in this round of school/job applications will shudder to think of what it’d be like to have a recommender like Jason Fitger, Yelp aficionado and yet-holding-on professor in an underfunded English department.
Pros: As someone who constantly sidetracks in everything I write, I cracked up reading these letters that began as a simple recommendation for a student, and morphed into so much more. The rote misery of the recommender is clear in his meandering paragraphs, but also in his description of the last-minute requests of many students, and even the salutations. On the whole, I was really impressed by Julie Schumacher’s commitment to the epistolary form and the various nuggets of information it can store.
Cons: The one place where I don’t think the one-sided letters aged well is with Fitger’s exes. It seems like he’s stalking them until halfway through the book, where you realize their presumed “radio silence” is mostly due to Fitger never getting to the point of things, which means he fails to mention their consensual meetings and discussions until the middle letters. Since we are left to rely on his roundabout description of events, it takes too long to establish that he’s just really annoying. This isn’t an egregious misstep on the part of the author, but in a time where people are airing the many abuses of power in academia, it doesn’t hold up the best. Also, I lost steam about halfway through, which is to say that I think this book didn’t need about 25% of the letters to reach its mark. Finally, I wish I could say that the plot twist at the end was a chilling reminder of the dire consequences of universities’ exploitation of their employees and students. Instead, it came across as a drastic tonal shift that wrapped up this novel in an unearned bow.
Final rating: 3 stars, which in this case, means I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend this book, but if you’re already interested, I wouldn’t discourage you from reading it, either.
TW (and spoiler)
.
.
.
.
Discussion (without graphic depiction) of a character’s suicide in the last 20 pages.