Starred review from March 14, 2022
Hart debuts with a transfixing queer coming-of-age novel about a woman’s affair with a much older professor. Mallory Green is in her first year at a college on Long Island shortly after her mother’s death from cancer in 2008. There, she becomes fixated on a never-named woman who teaches children’s literature. The professor, who is brusque but encouraging in their conversations, invites Mallory over for dinner. Her husband is away, and she makes plain her own attraction to Mallory. Despite feeling “embarrassed, as if she’d written an intense journal entry that she now had to read aloud,” Mallory plunges into an affair with her. The woman ends it when her professor husband returns at the end of the semester, leaving Mallory floundering as she attempts to date a male student and later drifts through postgraduation life in New York City. A flashback to Mallory’s youth traces her close friendship with a neighbor girl, saturated with frustrated desire. The professor’s reappearance four years after graduation, just as Mallory is settling into a new relationship, opens old wounds. Mallory’s intense interiority and self-consciousness will remind readers of Sally Rooney’s work, and Hart’s prose is delicate and piercing. This is auspicious and breathtaking. Agent: Sarah Burnes, Gernert Company.
June 1, 2022
College freshman Mallory meets an older woman at her university gym. She turns out to be a professor at the university where Mallory is a student, and Mallory is drawn in by the woman's brilliance, eccentricities, and aloofness toward the world. Still grieving the recent death of her mother, Mallory and the mysterious woman form a bond based on mutual losses. Though the affair is short-lived, the seductive tension of the relationship affects Mallory, her life, and her relationships for years to come. The na�vet� of Mallory and the seductiveness of the woman are brilliantly portrayed by narrator Barrie Kreinik. The novel handles the topics of young love, grief, power imbalance, and regret in a sensitive and subtle manner, often letting listeners come to their own conclusions. VERDICT This debut novel packs an emotional punch, exploring how relationships affect the people we become and the choices we make throughout our lives.--Elyssa Everling
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