Book review: “My Education” by Susan Choi

Our first glimpse of Regina Gottlieb is as a graduate student in her first days at a prestigious university. Somewhat naïve and more than a little intimidated by the sea of bright lights around her, Regina is drawn to a notorious and notoriously handsome English professor whose reputation has been both burnished and tarnished by rumors of sexual misbehavior.

Nicholas Brodeur, Regina muses when she first sees the infamous academic, was “certainly the best-looking man I had seen to that point in my life.” So enthralled by Brodeur and his dangerous aura that she enrolls in a seminar for which she is severely under qualified, Regina soon becomes Brodeur’s teaching assistant and is drawn into his innermost circle.

There, “My Education” by Susan Choi, takes an abrupt and unexpected twist by thrusting Regina into a torrid affair not with Brodeur, but with his beautiful and charismatic wife, Martha, also a professor at the university. And the novel itself becomes an exploration of love, loss and obsession.

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