Emily Fox Gordon

There were some inspired moments of academic satire here, but the book overall felt too effortful. It's difficult to do this genre exceptionally well, but it doesn't seem that difficult to do it in a readable and benignly amusing style. Since authors of books like these know their audience is primarily made up of people who will "get" academic satire (i.e., academics), they merely have to pepper otherwise uninteresting narratives with witty barbs about university life, its oddities and its eccentrics. Gordon does this well enough, but it feels workmanlike.

Characters were underdeveloped; plot was fairly nonexistent and ended with a (very odd) whimper. The book suffers from the same problem that plagues the main character, a failed author: "Her publisher packaged the books as a trilogy ... which was duly hailed as 'acid,' 'biting,' and 'caustic.' ... [Later] she found she'd lost access to whatever capacity it was that had called forth all those low-pH adjectives." It Will Come to Me is far from biting; instead, it offers a gummy nibble.… (mehr)