The Ghost Apple

by Aaron Thier

"Every college I looked at, the students were like, ‘Whoa, this place is awesome!’ Then I came to Tripoli and everyone was like, ‘I don’t know. You get used to it. It’s not so bad.’ So I thought I might as well come here." —Adam Longman, Class of 2011

Tripoli College is a humble New England institution. Originally founded as a free school for Native Americans, it is now beset by financial problems and so has entered into an increasingly troubling financial relationship with a snack food corporation. Big Anna® deposes the college president, uses the campus as a testing ground for their latest “dietary and mood additive,” and creates a field studies program in the Caribbean, where students in the (literal) field soon learn the true price of their Human Power Technology practices.

Set amidst this madness is a quasi love story, between Bill Brees, a dean going undercover as a student, utterly bemused by how things have changed since his undergrad days, and Maggie, an African American student startled into the realization that maybe nothing changes at all.

The Ghost Apple is told through a wealth of documents: tourism pamphlets, course catalogs, blog posts, historical letters, and slave narratives. Slowly, they reveal the extent of Tripoli's current crisis, and highlight those larger crises—of genocide, slavery, ignorance and indifference —on which the college and the nation were founded . . . and on which we continue to subsist.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Contemporary, Novels, Satire, Education, Science Fiction

575 pages, ebook

First published March 4, 2014

About the author

Aaron Thier was born in Baltimore and raised in western Massachusetts. He's the author of THE GHOST APPLE, MR. ETERNITY, and THE WORLD IS A NARROW BRIDGE (forthcoming July 2018).

Reviews

[switterbug (Betsey) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most outrageous novels I have read in quite some time. Not only is it a satire on neoliberalism, colonialism, higher education, and corporate greed, but it is also filled with pathos that seeps between the cracks...or, rather, my cracking up at Thier's irascible, sardonic wit! THE GHOST APPLE is sheer entertainment, transparent in the most casually ironic and bald-faced, brazen of ways.

When I read, at the start of this mash-up, culturally hip novel, "Founded in 1794 as a free school for Native Americans, Tripoli opened its doors to tuition-paying students of all backgrounds in 1795," I knew I was in for a clever and cunning story. It begins with a letter from the founder of the school, Israel Framingham Tripoli, grandson of John Morehead Tripoli, a man who was marooned on the Caribbean island of St Renard and well taken care of by the Carawak Indians for a year, until he was (unfortunately, for him) saved. His grandson intended for this school to be a free school for the education of the Wapahanock Indians.

Now, three centuries later, the American Tripoli college, as well as its proxy on St Renard, is nothing less than an abomination of greed and mandatory slave labor, veiled by its propaganda of "field studies" for students. On St. Renard, sugar cane is harvested by the natives, who work alongside of the students (and never allowed to speak to them). Big Anna, a huge corporation of sugar-intensive foods disguised as all-natual and nutritious, sponsors it all, since Tripoli College agreed to a financial relationship with them during the economic downturn. Big Anna professes to be "green" and use sustainable practices for their manufacturing of foods. Yes, well, hmmm...

Moreover, a dietary supplement is harvested on St. Renard, and forced down the throats of unwitting subjects. Some of the more hilarious side effects of the drug are "bioluminescence, syncopated mindbeat," and "Harlequin-like ichthyosis." And, indications for taking it are, among other reasons, "Can't find the television remote, are experiencing shifting political allegiance," and "Have heard recently that pine blight is destroying the Rocky Mountain Forests."

Thier's talent in telling this story is to combine blog posts by a seventy-year-old undercover dean (posing as a freshman), pricelessly uproarious course listings, the minutiae of faculty meetings, proclamations from a former professor-cum-head of a Liberation Army stationed on St. Renard, and other documents. The glue that ties it together and gives it gravitas are the emails to her twin brother (and the undercover dean, who she had befriended) from a perceptive, wise-beyond-her-years college Junior, Maggie Bell, a black American student who elects to go to St. Renard for the field studies program. And then, later, her slave narratives, which are poised and arresting.

"Now that Big Anna was endeavoring to reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, and indeed to adopt sustainable environmental practices, it had reverted to a much older method of processing the cane."

I am gobsmacked that this is Thier's debut novel. His wry, sublime humor and ability to turn a casual passage or sentence--or even a word--into an inflammatory yet risible irony is nothing short of brilliant.

[Rand · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-researched adventurous send-up of the post-colonial condition in which we find ourselves today. With moments of sublime lyricism and an inventive structure. Particular skewering given to: the US's FDA and its corporate controllers, private liberal arts colleges, globalization, fascism, and slavery. Further fault lines are formed along gender and age, though the predominant focus throughout is race.

Thier's tone is akin to that of George Saunders while the book itself resembles Infinite Jest (sans endnotes) albeit with a more straightforward chronology—everything that happens is relayed pretty much sequentially within the confines of a single academic year.

I very much enjoyed reading this book though I must confess to two things: I skipped around a bit (later going back to make sure I had read everything) and the copy I read was given to me courtesy of the publisher as part of the GoodReads First Reads program.

The character of William Brees, a septuagenarian Dean of Students who elects to go incognito as a freshman, is a riot and reminded me of Tom Wolfe researching I am Charlotte Simmons. The other faculty members and students are less developed caricatures who serve their purposes well.

The intersection of the various targets of this multilayered satire are at times brilliant to wit: the course catalog description of a poorly disguised clinical trial for an experimental drug, to cite one of many such examples. Also amusing are the malaria remedies lifted from actual medical history: here's a treatment for headaches due to malaria: The juice of fifty limes may be rubbed into the hair and a jug of cold water poured over the head.

The main collegiate characters assesses the Marxist critique of capitalism rather well by noting that the latter is "just people and when we say it's evil. we're really just expressing our disappointment with people. That they're not better than they are. That they're just people."

Some of the jokes are rather obscure: the abbreviation for the college's Committee for Curriculum and Core Programming is the same as the Soviet Union's abbreviation for itself; a lower-tier college football Bowl game is created in the town of Lawtey (a podunk speedtrap second which Thier knows of by virtue of having graduated from the University of Florida, located in nearby Gainesville). The challenge of recognizing such referents adds to the reader's joy of sifting "fact" from fiction. Thankfully, Thier identifies some of his more remote citations in his postscript.

Given the breadth of this book's concerns, its size could have easily been doubled. As it is, this is a rather quick read that does not miss a beat.

If you are at all concerned with the state of race relations today or the lack of relevance in higher education or corporations with a flagrant disregard for the general public's wellbeing, then Ghost Apple is a good read for you.

[Jill · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good twisted satire – the use of irony, exaggeration or ridicule to expose and criticize vices and shortcomings -- is not the easiest thing to pull off. Often, it either takes itself too seriously or it collapses under sophomoric humor. But in Ghost Apple, debut author Aaron Their gets it just right.

Through a varied collection of historical accounts, newspaper excerpts, blog posts, slave narratives and personal letters, the tale of Tripoli College emerges. The school has just been taken over by the corporate snack food/pharma giant, Big Anna®, with woeful consequences for idealistic students.

The 70-year-old dean, William Brees, dyes his hair and goes undercover to better understand student life. There he develops a crush on an attractive and privileged African-American student, Maggie, who already has a crush on her activist professor, John Kabaka. All the while, Big Anna® is stampeding over student rights, taking political correctness to laughable extremes, conducting field studies on unsuspecting students on St. Renard in the Caribbean, and perpetuating atrocities just about everywhere it steps.

Aaron Thier has the cadence of corporate and administrative communication down pat – using words to obfuscate true meanings. How can you not laugh out loud with this special promotional feature sponsored by the St. Renard Ministry of Tourism (“Finally, don’t leave St. Renard without sampling the delicacies of our bright blue sea. Head down to the wharf in Port Kingston or visit some of the nearby alleyways, for fresh-caught seafood. Some species of fish are so endangered, you could be the last person who ever tastes them!”)

Yet, as with any good satire, this one lampoons corporate excesses, political correctness and environmental policies gone awry and the overuse of registered trademarks with some serious underpinnings. Maggie, the moral center of the novel, says this: “Capital is just people and when we say it’s evil, we’re really just expressing our disappointment with people. In the fact that people are not better than they are. That they’re just people.”

The Ghost Apple is intelligent, imaginative, and ingenious. Get ready to devour it!

[Anjula · Rating 2 out of 5]

Academia is ripe for satire, but this misses the mark. There are so many voices, so many language styles--most of them nonsense--that the book is hard to read. It was an act of will to finish.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars. ** Underrated book alert! **

This book was absolutely brilliant. A quasi-epistolary satire that centers around a bankrupt university which is forced to sell what soul it has left to a snack foods corporation. This is a ripping critique on the commercialization of universities, American historical amnesia about slavery and colonialism, as well as the effects of globalization. The Ghost Apple is so smart, biting, and absurd in its treatment of university bureaucracy. The ending could've been a bit more concrete but I couldn't get enough of this inventive and hilarious book.

[Spencer Mize · Rating 3 out of 5]

What a fabulously bizarre book! I've always enjoyed writing that embeds different media (letters, brochures, press releases, etc.) into a greater story, but this was perhaps a bit over the top. I'm also a huge fan of dark satire, and of deep introspection of our economic systems as they relate to progress and equality.

Thus, all the ingredients were there for a 5-star read, but...it's not. To carry the cooking analogy just a tad further - I think that perhaps there's too much salt in this recipe. It was especially enjoyable in the first half, but I found myself just bulldozing the second half in order to finish it.

I think with some more heavy-handed editing and 50-75 fewer pages, this could be a classic. As it stands, it's merely pretty good.

[Rachel Wexelbaum · Rating 5 out of 5]

I couldn't put this book down once I started. Aaron Thier totally gets the inner workings of academia, as well as how white "liberals" still condone slavery. If I ever teach a course on racism, I would pair this book with Wilder's Ebony and Ivy, as Thier has created a fictionalized yet well-researched account of the real history of higher education institutions being established and controlled by slave owners. It doesn't change in the 21st century, when floundering liberal arts colleges cut deals with big corporations (or dare I say the Chinese government) for funding.

[Ilene]

It seems like it's a good book and quite interesting if that is your cup of tea. It's just not mine so it's becoming a DNF for me.

[Terry L · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Razor‑Sharp Satire of Academia and Capitalism; Brilliant, Biting, and Relentlessly Original

Aaron Thier’s "The Ghost Apple" is a fierce, mordantly funny dissection of the modern university and its uneasy marriage with corporate power. Written in Thier’s signature blend of satire, parody, and irony, the novel scrutinizes how financially vulnerable colleges sell their autonomy to corporate benefactors, transforming scholarship into a marketable brand. Through a barrage of administrative memos, marketing campaigns, and policy circulars, Thier exposes a campus increasingly run by a snack‑food and pharmaceutical conglomerate—a grotesque yet plausible image of higher learning reimagined as corporate franchise.

Set partly on Tripoli University’s offshore campus on the Caribbean island of St. Renard, the novel widens its lens to globalization and exploitation, tracing uncanny continuities between academic corporatization and older colonial economies. The island’s sugar industry, Big Anna’s pseudo‑sustainable cost‑cutting, and buried histories of forced labor all underscore how neoliberal rhetoric of “innovation” conceals the endurance of economic and racial violence.

The book’s title fruit, a hybrid of medicine and poison cultivated by an extinct Indigenous people, serves as an indelible image of commodified history. Thier connects institutional guilt and erasure with rituals of remembrance that sanitize the slave past while profiting from it.

Told through a dizzying collage of emails, blogs, syllabi, and advertisements, "The Ghost Apple" mirrors the chaos of information overload while probing who controls institutional narratives. Characters such as the idealistic Maggie Bell and the insurgent Visiting Professor Kabaka dramatize the moral ambiguities of resistance under bureaucratic technocracy.

Thier’s prose is remarkably versatile, shifting effortlessly from the stately diction of an eighteenth-century letter to the clipped immediacy of a modern email or a set of bureaucratic quasi‑minutes. Readers unfamiliar with or resistant to epistolary fiction may find the form challenging, but those who enjoy narrative experimentation will be rewarded by its wit and precision.

[Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Razor‑Sharp Satire of Academia and Capitalism; Brilliant, Biting, and Relentlessly Original
Aaron Thier’s "The Ghost Apple" is a fierce, mordantly funny dissection of the modern university and its uneasy marriage with corporate power. Written in Thier’s signature blend of satire, parody, and irony, the novel scrutinizes how financially vulnerable colleges sell their autonomy to corporate benefactors, transforming scholarship into a marketable brand. Through a barrage of administrative memos, marketing campaigns, and policy circulars, Thier exposes a campus increasingly run by a snack‑food and pharmaceutical conglomerate—a grotesque yet plausible image of higher learning reimagined as corporate franchise.

Set partly on Tripoli University’s offshore campus on the Caribbean island of St. Renard, the novel widens its lens to globalization and exploitation, tracing uncanny continuities between academic corporatization and older colonial economies. The island’s sugar industry, Big Anna’s pseudo‑sustainable cost‑cutting, and buried histories of forced labor all underscore how neoliberal rhetoric of “innovation” conceals the endurance of economic and racial violence.

The book’s title fruit, a hybrid of medicine and poison cultivated by an extinct Indigenous people, serves as an indelible image of commodified history. Thier connects institutional guilt and erasure with rituals of remembrance that sanitize the slave past while profiting from it.

Told through a collage of emails, blogs, syllabi, and advertisements, "The Ghost Apple" mirrors the chaos of information overload while probing who controls institutional narratives. Characters such as the idealistic Maggie Bell and the insurgent Visiting Professor Kabaka dramatize the moral ambiguities of resistance under bureaucratic technocracy.

Thier’s prose is remarkably versatile, shifting effortlessly from the stately diction of an eighteenth-century letter to the clipped immediacy of a modern email or a set of bureaucratic quasi‑minutes. Readers unfamiliar with or resistant to epistolary fiction may find the form challenging, but those who enjoy narrative experimentation will be rewarded by its wit and precision.

[A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this was a quick read if nothing else. In short, I believe this is a book by white people for white people.

It started off as an entertaining satire of private higher education and spun out into something a lot more surreal in a way I'm not sure I really loved. The fabulism got a bit hard to follow at times and I found myself questioning what was the point of all of it.

The use of the imagery of slavery in particular felt like it started to lean into the realm of shock value without necessarily needing to be there to accomplish the same effect. I've been struggling to find the words for why its deployment in this case felt so uniquely uncomfortable.

I think the best I can do is to quote from A Source of Self-Regard by Toni Morrison: "Because the problem is always pornography. It is very easy to write about something like that and find yourself in the position of a voyeur, where actually the violence, the grotesqueries, and the pain and the suffering becomes its own excuse for reading".

I'm not saying that slavery shouldn't have been a part of the narrative nor should its horrors be diminished. However, I think there is a way to approach the subject with more deft than I saw deployed here.

[LeeLee Lulu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is about a shitty, isolated college in the American Northeast that's basically a down-on-its-luck community college. Everyone's miserable there. The staff are an in-fighting mess. People are comically weird.

When the finance officer gambles away the school's endowment, the school makes a deal with a huge, evil food company. The company provides the school with money; the school allows the food company to experiment on its students and take some of them for "semesters abroad" at its "branch campus" on a Caribbean sugar cane farm.

It starts off as really wacky satire, but gets intense toward the end. Granted, the ramping of intensity is necessary in order to advance the stakes of the plot. However, I think the book might take it a bit too far.

That said, this is a fun book that I enjoyed a bunch. (BANANA JOKE?) I'm going to have to look into more of this author's work.

[Sarah Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A broadly zany dark comedy about a small liberal arts college backed into relying for funding into partnership with an evil plantation which raises sugar cane and bananas and makes sugar. The Dean of Students goes undercover as a freshman to gain understanding of what makes students tick and is broadly accepted, despite his age. A Black guest lecturer in history is outraged at the corporate partnership and resigns to go fight in the mountains of the plantation, grieving a girl in his class who has a crush on him. One of the best parts of the novel is her journal, modelled on the classic format of the slave narrative, on her field work in the plantation, which is brutal. Nothing much is resolved by the end of the novel, but the girl's brother does come out to his conservative father, who hugs him and says he loves him

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you're a fan of satire, this book should be an enjoyable read. Go in knowing there'll be varying POVs, formats, etc and that keeping track of the information and threads is only a chore if you aren't one who enjoys close reading. This book wont be for everyone, but it is for any one. Thier touches on great ideas and musings amidst many absurdities and serious topics. A great debut.

[Nadine in California]

Much as I love Thier's other two books, I couldn't get past the first 20 or pages. The story idea is great, much of it was amusing for those 20 pages, but the format of toggling between newspaper articles, the Dean's blog, etc - which I usually like - didn't work for me here. It might have been my mood, maybe I'll try it again some time.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hysterical and unnerving and smarter than it should be. Loved it in every way--a spoiled New England liberal arts college presented in timehopping, voice-swapping collage of documents? Yes please and I'll have another.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Ghost Apple is a very modern epistolary novel which goes wildly off the rails and mostly succeeds at it. Tripoli College (Go Tyrants!) has fallen on some financial hardship, and its leadership agrees to let Big Anna® brands come in and help them out - as long as they agree to stock the dining halls with Banana Bran Muffins® and try out its "comprehensive dietary and mood additive" Malpraxalin® on the football team. (The relentless trademarks are just one sign of the Aaron Thier's satirical style.)

We're taken through an academic year in meeting minutes of academic committees, blog posts of an "undercover" dean, e-mails from a student to her brother, political manifestos, slavery memoirs, and other miscellanea about Tripoli and Big Anna®'s histories. It becomes clear early on that The Ghost Apple is going to drag higher education for both its stifling tendencies (see: the Committee on Curriculum and Core Programming (CCCP)) and its checkered relationship with colonialism and corporatism. That the study abroad program turns out to be indentured servitude camouflaged in the language of environmentalism is a grimly pleasing twist.

My main critiques are that the chaos at Tripoli and St. Renard is resolved too neatly, and that the large cast of academic characters were largely difficult to distinguish (but I wish there were more of Professor Kabaka in particular!). Beyond these, I did enjoy the sharp satire and Thier's perverse imagination in creating a sleepy, mediocre college with dark secrets.

[idiomatic · Rating 2 out of 5]

it's nonmalignant, but woke White Nonsense™ is nevertheless Nonsense and it's never a good sign when all the comp authors are dead.

[Robert Lowry · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few too many things going on to let the satire hit the mark. I enjoyed the book but not as much as I wish I had.

[Monica · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ambitious, exhaustively researched and mostly successful satire that treats of higher education selling out to corporate funders, political correctness in a variety of forms, colonialism, multinational agricultural monoculture, globalization, reparations for slavery. Etc.

The story take place in two locations - the Caribbean island of St. Renard and the New Hampshire campus of Tripoli College which has an off campus program on the island.

It is told in a variety of narrations - the blog of an elderly dean who goes undercover as a nontraditional student to see what students are really like, the writings of an early settler of the island of St. Renard, the e-mails of Maggie Bell, Tripoli student who goes to St. Renard to follow a politically radical professor with whom she is smitten, the bemused and befuddled secretary of the university's note of faculty meetings.

Some of these seemed more successful than others - at least more engaging, and there are some wonderfully zingy moments.

[Berslon Pank · Rating 1 out of 5]

I agree with the author's assessment of the state of many of our modern institutions and the culture in which we live, but I just didn't find the jokes that funny. For me the satire just became a slog. Part of this was the amount of cultural ephemera that was packed into the book (travel guides, drug labels, etc). I found these to be distracting and mostly boring. The jokes tended to lose their utility after about a page.

However, I think my main difficulty was a lack of characters for me to dig into. I really enjoyed Bill Brees. He was a super fun character to follow and I found something novel in the way he was used to satirize university culture. I couldn't get into Maggie Bell's story and when her story became a slave narrative I found myself pushed farther away by the style (although the style seemed to be executed very well). I thought all of the jokes and satire associated with Maggie were pretty familiar and didn't impress me as fresh. After that the characters stopped being characters and were just set ups for more not very funny satire.

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thier has written a sharply satirical look at the corporate culture of the modern college and further, a critical look at the system of injustice and general human ugliness that underlies it. And yet, he does so with absurd wit. His touch is so heavy, the dilemmas so grotesque,that I was laughing out loud. When a faculty senate meeting lurches quite cheerfully toward murder in order to deal with the revealed skeletons in a faculty member's closet, when an elderly dean goes "undercover" as a college freshman, anyone who has had contact with a college or university lately will be chortling. And yet, Their's satiric touch is sharp and clever. Definitely worth reading both for the entertainment value and for the sobering reflections on the state of higher education and our political/economic state in general.

[Jeanne · Rating 3 out of 5]

With a self-serve pudding bar in every dining hall and courses like HIST 215/How to Make a Grapefruit: An Introduction to Atlantic History, Tripoli College is hardly an institution of academic achievement. No, it is a college attended by students who were not admitted to their first choice of colleges.

And the faculty? Yikes!

Anyway, the school faces financial troubles and teams up with corporate America to stay afloat. Snack food giant Big Anna Brands comes to Tripoli’s rescue, but at a very high price: slavery.

Yep, that’s right—students who choose to attend Tripoli’s campus on the island of St. Renard for the “field studies” program are enslaved. How else can the sugar cane be harvested?

Told by various points of view, this humorous novel sends up academia, as well as globalization. Thier has a unique style that will entertain readers.

[Cyndi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very difficult book to review. The author attempted something quite complex and he didn't quite pull it off. He juxtaposes the absurdity of a broad, somewhat grotesque, unreal satire with the true absurdity of the reality of slavery. The first 2/3 of the book is humorous, though mostly in a groaning sort of way, and goes on way too long. There are no true characters and I nearly put down the book. In the last third or so of the book, the characters of Maggie and Bill start to come through. Maggie in particular as she writes movingly about her experiences with the book's villains, the mega-corporation Big Anna. There are no shining moments here; just a system that doesn't care about the individuals and moves on oblivious to the events that change people's lives. And that is the biggest absurdity of all. I would give the book 2.5 stars.

[Laura Ruetz · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a long time since I've read satire in proper form. Anybody who had to read "A Modest Proposal" in school can tell you that satire is only effective when presented with deadpan seriousness. Aaron Their nails satire with this book. It is not a traditional narrative, but rather the story is effectively built through school newsletters, memos, blog articles by the Dean of Students, letters home by a student and in hilarious meeting notes from school meetings.

Everything is presented with absolutely sincerity, which is why it works. It also draws upon relevant topics such as corporations and slavery and brings it to light. The book in engrossing and effective in getting its message across to the reader.

[Simon Traynor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I like it. I definitely laughed while reading, and I appreciate this new author's writing style. The satire pokes at the state of our Universities, our ignorant dependence upon large outsourced industry, and the influence colonization still holds over us all (though obviously some more than others). The author does a great job researching his subject, and for the most part I enjoy following his form; the story is told through documents discovered by the reader. I really enjoy this technique when it works well. I had trouble believing or following some of the transitions, though. Overall, I recommend this book and I'll be looking for his next novel!

[(a)lyss(a) · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Do we just accept the impossibility of ever doing anything that doesn't harm at least one person?"

This book is a witty satire on capitalism, colonialism, and academia.

It's a clever look at how colleges are run, how capitalism works, and how these things happen. This book has a variety of characters with very unique voices which makes the story feel real. It also grossly parallels the privatization of higher education and big business. It raises questions about how harmful capitalism is and if there's truly any alternative. I was also impressed by how well researched the story is.

A surprisingly short and punchy read.

[Danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good novel, but it tries to parody too much at once. reading the afterward to find out exactly how much research work the novelist did and tried to include in his work makes me admire him a little more but does little to address the fact that while reading the book, you are continually annoyed as to why there's all these strange background characters with confusing language.

I really do wish he had focused on the college campus and issues of current global corporate issues and left the GMO/additive parts out.

[Martha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is getting four stars for its creativity. At first it just seemed odd and disjointed, but as I read more it lulled together. It is difficult to take subjects this broad; globalization, sustainability, capitalism, slavery, abuse of power set in a Caribbean island and a small liberal art college run amok to name a few of the threads woven into the plot. All with masterful satire. At times it was a bit of a hash, but for creativity it is well worth the read. Quite a feat for a first time out.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kind of reminded me of Up the Down Staircase in the way it has many narrators and pokes fun at the frustrations of academia. It's obviously way more pointed a satire than that book. It could be faulted for treating subjects like slavery and race insensitively, but I think the research and attention to detail put into the book show a level of care and engagement that justify the more grotesque moments. Loved it!