Review by Booklist Review
When academic frenemies reunite at a conference, it brings back sad, sordid memories of their time in the Program, a claustrophobic midwestern graduate program with classes like Ret-Con Dynamics and the Sedentary Sublime. The class to get into, Ethical Negation, is taught by Bethany Ladd, a lofty intellectual whom hometown best friends, down-at-the-heels Mackenzie Woods and blithely privileged Gwendolyn Whitney, compete to dazzle. As Gwen and Mac increasingly show their resentments over too many drinks at the conference, the bizarre lengths they went to for success, the secrets they kept, and the lives that were destroyed will remind academic readers all too well of the worlds they came from or inhabit. Gentry has academic pettiness and feigned lack of ambition down pat, while also drawing a painful, all-too-real picture of a poor student trying to keep up with richer peers. Mac as narrator creates a tale of psychological survival and suspense that readers of Gentry's Good as Gone (2016) and other tales of women struggling in a world that wants them to fail will relish.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Professor Mackenzie Claire Woods, the narrator of this engrossing psychological thriller from Gentry (Good as Gone), is on a career high, finally achieving her quest for respect after delivering a keynote speech at an academic conference held at an L.A. hotel. She's about to retreat to her suite when she spots Gwen Whitney, her former best friend and rival. Flashbacks reveal how the once close friendship Mackenzie and Gwen formed in high school splintered after they were admitted to a prestigious, cultlike graduate humanities program at Dwight Handler University. There, the two women vie for the attention of the university's power couple professors, Bethany Ladd and her husband, Rocky Semyonovich, who use gossip, betrayal, and sex to control students. Bethany and Rocky will also determine who receives a fellowship that, for some, is worth killing for. Superior storytelling makes up for the off-putting leads and an absurd twist toward the end. This rousing exposé of the politics of academia, with its textbook reputation for backbiting, will keep readers turning the pages. Agent: Sharon Pelletier, Dystel & Goderich Literary. (Feb.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Rising-star academic Claire "Mac" Woods first met wealthy sophisticate Gwendolyn Whitney in high school, and they crash-landed competitively in the same grad school program. How far did Mac go to get ahead? From the author of the New York Times best-selling Good as Gone; with a 30,000-copy paperback and 3,000-copy hardcover first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Grad students are tasty snacks in the shark tank of faculty ambition. Gentry sets her third thriller in the world of academe, where we find a slew of powerful female characters and some male eye candy. Mackenzie Claire Woods has just finished her keynote at an academic conference in LA and is about to take a young fellow she knows only as "Harvard" up to her room in the SkyLoft Hotel when she spots her long-estranged childhood best friend. Gwen Whitney was the princess to Mac's pauper, her escape route from a hardscrabble childhood that included junior beauty pageants, her father's abandonment, her mother's drug addiction, and a disabled sister. Both Mac and Gwen went on to graduate school at The Program, a taxing course of study in rarefied disciplines, painted with a welcome touch of satire. Coming from her family, is it any wonder grad student Mac can't make heads or tails of topics like Diasporic Feminisms, Dualities of Motion and Emotion, and Introduction to Economimesis? Most problematically, she can't get through a tome titled "Ethical Negation," written by the faculty star, Bethany Ladd, a sexy genius everyone is competing to impress and whose seminar is offered at the same time as Mac's restaurant shift. Since the poor girl is not only putting herself through school, but supporting her mother and sister, she desperately needs a fellowship Bethany seems to control. The narrative hopscotches between the challenges of grad school and the unfolding drama, 10 years later, in the SkyLoft Hotel. Mac sends Harvard up to her room by himself and steps out of the elevator to waylay Gwen. They have a heart-to-heart during which Mac gets blackout drunk and wakes up unable to remember just how much she confessed about some terrible incident in the past: suspense by alcohol. As the story races to its conclusion, a racism issue with another student is needlessly tacked on and believability is tossed to the winds. A tense psychological thriller with an intriguing setup but too many far-fetched twists at the end. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
