My education

Title:

My education

Author:

Choi, Susan, 1969-

Personal Author:

Choi, Susan, 1969-

ISBN:

9780670024902

Publication Information:

Physical Description:

296 pages ; 24 cm

Abstract:

Warned about the womanizing activities of Professor Nicholas Brodeur before her arrival at his prestigious university, graduate student Regina Gottlieb is nevertheless captured by his charisma and good looks before falling prey to his volatile wife.

Subject Term:

Teacher-student relationships -- Fiction.

Genre:

Erotic fiction.

Summary:

Holds:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Shelf Number	Status
Searching... Ginter Park	Book	FICTION CHOI	Searching... Unknown
Searching... Main Library	Book	FICTION CHOI	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

An intimately charged novel of desire and disaster from the author of American Woman and A Person of Interest

Regina Gottlieb had been warned about Professor Nicholas Brodeur long before arriving as a graduate student at his prestigious university high on a pastoral hill. He's said to lie in the dark in his office while undergraduate women read couplets to him. He's condemned on the walls of the women's restroom, and enjoys films by Roman Polanski. But no one has warned Regina about his exceptional physical beauty--or his charismatic, volatile wife.

My Education is the story of Regina's mistakes, which only begin in the bedroom, and end--if they do--fifteen years in the future and thousands of miles away. By turns erotic and completely catastrophic, Regina's misadventures demonstrate what can happen when the chasm between desire and duty is too wide to bridge.

Reviews (1)

Kirkus Review

The sexual initiation of a graduate student, who learns how much she does not know, in a novel that somehow feels both overstuffed (style) and undernourished (substance). From the reference in the first sentence to "a highly conspicuous man," one of "scandalous, noteworthiness, and exceptional, even sinister, attractiveness," Choi (A Person of Interest, 2008, etc.) makes it obvious to the reader that the novel's rites of passage won't be confining this education to the classroom. Yet what seems inevitable, particularly after the narrator becomes the teaching assistant to the man of such scandalous, sinister attractiveness, turns out to be anything but, as her attraction to her mentor is mere prelude to complications involving the professor's wife, the professor's nannies, the narrator's roommate, and one alcohol-drenched party and another even more drunken happy hour. Throughout, Regina Gottlieb seems as clueless and directionless as she is articulate (or at least verbose; she expresses herself in convoluted sentences and paragraphs that test the reader's endurance). She thinks and writes (for, ultimately, she becomes a writer) like this: "Even I, who had never before had a female lover; much less one who was married; much less married to my own former mentor; much less a professor herself at the school at which I was a student--even I who, due to all this complicated inexperience...," and so on. Her orgasms require expressions almost as choppy: "I seemed to come right away, with a hard, popping effervescence, as if her mouth had raised blisters, or an uppermost froth; but beneath, magma still heaved and groaned and was yearning to fling itself into the air." Flash forward 15 years, when she informs, succinctly, "Reader, I grew up," and her education has now extended to her own marriage ("an intricate code of reliance") and middle age (when "the least reconcilable times of one's life would in fact coexist until death" and "I didn't live thoughtlessly in my flesh anymore"). Yet her past improbably returns as more than flashbacks, and her education leaves her by the end knowing even less than when she had started. There seems to be a happy ending here, though it's hard to be certain for whom.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.