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Campusland

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Campusland

By: Scott Johnston
Narrated by: Casey Turner
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About this listen

Joyous, fast and funny, Scott Johnston’s Campusland is a satiric howl at today’s elite educational institutions - from safe spaces to tribal infighting to the sheer sanctimony. A wickedly delightful audiobook that may remind you of Tom Wolfe and David Lodge.

Her room sucks. Her closet isn’t big enough for two weeks’-worth of outfits, much less her new Rag & Bone for fall. And there’s nothing worth posting. Cruel. To Lulu Harris - It Girl-in-the-Making - her first year at the ultra-competitive Ivy-like Devon University is a dreary impediment. If she’s fabulous and no one sees it, what’s the point?

To Eph Russell, who looks and sounds like an avatar of privilege (shh! - he’s anything but) Devon is heaven. All day to think and read and linger over a Welsh rarebit at The Faculty Club, not to mention teach English 240 where he gets to discuss all his 19th-century favorites, like Mark Twain. If Eph could just get tenure, he could stay forever, but there are landmines everywhere.

In his seventh year at Devon, Red Wheeler is the alpha dog on top of Devon’s progressive hierarchy, the most woke guy on campus. But when his position is challenged, Red is forced to take measures.

Before first term is halfway finished, Lulu bungles her social cache with her clubbable upperclass peers, and is forced to reinvent herself. Shedding her designer clothes, she puts on flannel and a brand-new persona: campus victim. For Lulu to claw her way back to the top, she’ll build a pyre and roast anyone in her way.

Presiding over this ferment is Milton Strauss, Devon’s feckless president, who spends his days managing perpetually aggrieved students, scheming administrators, jealous professors, billionaire donors, and bumptious frat boys. He just can’t say yes fast enough. And what to do with Martika Malik-Adams? Isn’t her giant salary as vice-president of Diversity & Inclusion enough?

All paths converge as privileged, marginalized, and radical students form identity alliances, sacrifice education for outrage, and push varied agendas of political correctness that drags every free thought of higher learning into the lower depths of an entitled underclass.

©2019 Scott Johnston (P)2019 Macmillan Audio
Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Literature & Fiction Satire Comedy

Critic reviews

"This high-spirited, richly imagined, and brave novel is a delight to read...Smart and hilarious." (Kirkus Reviews)

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I loved this book when I read it - it absolutely skewered so many of the things you can imagine going on in universities with so many sensitivities to be catered to - but the audio version is ruined for me by the narrator’s repeated ‘uptick’ at the end of sentences, and indeed in strange places part way through them as well. Narrative sense can be subtly altered by creating a question where none is written, or a feeling of finality partway through a sentence when in fact there are other connected things to follow. A very odd way to deliver something, and I’m pretty sure it’s not an unconscious thing either, because sometimes she doesn’t do it. Completely spoiled it for me.

Dreadful intonation

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