Adelmann interrogates and deconstructs the Campus Novel, turning it into a narrative about overworked, underpaid, adjuncts, the stratification and class divisions of academic work, the plight of the gig worker in general (no healthcare, no money, precarious housing, no savings and we're all just supposed to live like this??), and the false promise of college education. It's a lot of lifting for one book, and I don't think she hits every point with equal alacrity, but that would be asking a lot for a nonfiction book, let alone a fiction one. I especially enjoyed the many approaches to the campus novel that allowed us to look at it in different ways--which I elaborate on in this post🔗. One of the things I most enjoyed in this book was the thread of Sam's struggle to understand her own desires--or lack thereof--around sex/sexuality and relationships. This lack of interest and even occasional repulsion from sex has caused difficulties for here throughout her life (something I'm sure my fellow acespecs out there can relate to!) and she describes her relationship to sex as very formulaic and almost scripted. She also talks about her feelings around romance at once point, basically saying she finds it confusing and unrelatable, which I've never found more relatable. I absolutely drank up all of the sections where Sam is puzzling over her relationship to sex, desire etc because it felt so rare and special to have a book surprise me with interesting, thoughtful, fresh exploration of this without making it a book ABOUT being aspec. My one annoyance with this book is my bone to pick with all litfic which is that it will often devolve into paragraphs of being too pretentious, didactic, or navel-gazey for me to tolerate, and I'll roll my eyes. I alllmost DNF'd at around 30% because of one particularly navel-gazey bit about labels and terms, but I pressed on and I'm glad I did because it is a genuinely good piece of writing it's just...also litfic and unfortunately cannot escape the cardinal sin of the genre. This is the price I pay for continuing to find the premises of litfic books interesting and trying to read them despite knowing what will be inside!