I’m so excited to be reading from my debut novel The Girl in Duluth next week at one of my favorite Twin Cities bookstores: Eat My Words Bookstore in northeast Minneapolis (9/27 at 7 pm). I’ll be sharing the stage with Twin Cities historian and writer Phil Adamo. Phil will read from his new novel The Medievalist, called by Kirkus Reviews “an engrossing tale” & “a delightfully peculiar blend of intellectual and criminal investigation.”
In The Medievalist, controversial Yale professor Abe Kantorowicz enlists two grad students to fight neo-Nazis on the battlefield of propaganda. Set in today’s America, the novel is chock full of real history, yet resonates with present-day issues: the dangers of racism and white supremacy, the uses and abuses of the past, and the responsibilities of academia.
Phil taught for twenty years at Augsburg University and has published both popular & academic books and articles about the Middle Ages, including New Monks in Old Habits (2014) and “Braveheart at the Battle of Falkirk” in Medieval LEGO (2015).
Read my review of The Medievalist below!
The Medievalist is told primarily from the point-of-view of Molly Isaacson, a new graduate student at Yale, and we meet her on the day she sees for the first time the library where she’ll be working. The thing I love the most about this book is the way Adamo captures the rapturous moments Molly has when she sees her study carrel stacked with books, hears professors debate, understands the significance of a detail in an illuminated manuscript—when it dawns on her, and keeps dawning on her in richer and richer ways, that she’s made it to the place where the joy of scholarship is hers, where she gets to do it every day, where she’s around other people who share that joy. Then the story quickly shows us that there are many things that endanger this pleasure: the threat of white supremacists co-opting pieces of the historical world she’s endlessly fascinated by, Molly’s own confusion and moral dilemmas about how *she* should or shouldn’t use that same history. Those dangers make her joy feel all the more precious and rare.