The Latinist

A fairly transparent attempt to jump on the "dark academia" bandwagon and seize the moment when academia is considered sufficiently sexy to serve as the backdrop for lots of popular novels.

I'll be honest, I didn't finish this book. The premise is kind of interesting--what would you do if you found out your dissertation advisor intentionally wrote you a terrible letter of recommendation and tried to tank your career? But for the first 50 pages, the answer was mostly "sit around and tell yourself that it couldn't possibly be true." Scintillating!

As an academic, I was also irritated (in addition to being bored). The author clearly knows very little about how universities and search committees operate. It's like if I wrote a book about pipe show more fitters but never asked an actual pipe fitter about their job. show less

I read this because duh, I studied classics. While I was a Hellenist (ooh), not a Latinist, I get a lot of second-hand joy and cringe from the romanticization of the study. Let me tell you kids: studying an ancient language is real drudge work, with memorization akin to a biology class, so the students in these classes are not... cool. At all. They don't even understand dark academia. There's no time for it. We're not really overgrown mythology kids either. We don't wax poetically about meter. We're just nerds who work really hard. One of my old classmates is going into corporate law for God's sake. I'm becoming an archivist.

Anyways, this book was... boring. A bit overwritten. It was suspenseful at parts, and creepy, and I found Prins show more to genuinely write women well... but ultimately... Meh. For its creepiness, it ends in a semi-appropriate way. But like another commentator pointed out, it takes a certain mind to justify a 27-year-old woman wanting to fuck her older professor. Yuck. show less

A perceptively written modern day Daphne and Apollo tale on the campus of Oxford University. Mark Prins uses his knowledge mixed with emotion and humor to capture to the academic environment and pressures felt between professors and their students. Tessa must prove herself academically to others despite the efforts of her protégé advisor Chris, who tries through romance to sabotage her work and block her academic pathway. The supporting characters add dimension, perspective and intrigue to his narrative, and provide Tessa with information, support, and clues in finishing and figuring out her situation with Chris. On the other hand there are supporting characters who favor Chris. The details of Tessa’s discoveries, going back to show more discover the similarities between modern and ancient civilizations, add to the reader’s involvement, and fascination with academia and how success is achieved even with the odds are against you. It may take the reader a short time to absorbed in this modern-day Daphne and Apollo tale, the reader will find it an engaging, fascinating and engaging read. show less

I had never read a dark academia book, so I gave it a whirl. I was intrigued from the perspective of Maeve being a classics grad student, and from the perspective of my many friends that teach at the college level. It was an OK read, but it really lost stea at the end when the main characters does some things that seem to serve a dramatic purpose, but which no one under any circumstances, would ever do. My credulity was strained to breaking. Will probably be a major motion picture one day.

interesting story, with a nice twist at the end. Probably would have been even more interesting if I'd had a deeper understanding of the related myths. Academic backstabbing and obsession at its finest

An American mangling of an Oxford novel. What search committee? How would she possibly have been admitted to Oxford with a mediocre background? And so on and so on.