Review: Eventide

Eventide by Therese Bohman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On the surface, this book seemed to be yet another middle-aged professor has relationship with student narrative, with the flipped gender script. But I'm glad I read to the end, because I felt like it was much more than that.

Karolina is an art professor, recently divorced, and living in a tiny apartment. She starts to question what she is doing with her life, and along the way there are some encounters that felt very real, even the conversation with the colleague down the hall who can barely give her the time of day because his ego takes up so much of the room. She enters into a fling with a PhD student with very little thought, just an impulse really, and then realizes why that might have happened (and it isn't as flattering as one would hope; if you were looking for a steamy professor-student romance this is not your book)....

I appreciated the exploration of where women truly are in society now. Has feminism freed us? Are we still tied to whether or not a man wants to have babies with us? What is feminism in art? Is it focusing on obscure female artists or is it something more? Can a female art professor have a focus other than that and what would that be? What is her value and how do others see her? Should she entertain the blue collar boy from her childhood and give up on the life she has created? Where would the meaning be found? Where is satisfaction?

Hmm, I feel I've given a lot away, but not how she discovers these questions, or how she answers them. It was a resonant read for me.

Thanks to the publisher for providing access to this title through NetGalley. It came out April 10.

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