A review by wordfey
Academic Exercises by K.J. Parker
3.0
A brilliantly conceived and executed series of plots in a well-paced collection... in which there's pretty much just one male character, in one type of voice, repeated over and over again, sometimes in conversation with itself.
This is a satirical look at academia. One gets the sense that, in many places, the author is making fun of the fact that some of our written record is made of voices like the one he chose. But Parker/Holt's idea of academia as masculine and unvarying ultimately killed the book for me. As a caricature of academia, Parker's cynical, lazy elitists are only slightly less cringeworthy than the stereotypical nearsighted, tweed-and-bow-tie professor. And when you have all of your characters repeating tired tropes about women without variation for your entire book, when all of your female characters are demons or victims or useless or dead, when you make it literally biological that women get magic later in life--sorry, you've failed. I'm a medievalist by training and a classicist by subsequent study--I can tell you there are voices we fail to hear here, and that was the unfortunate choice of the author, not a reflection of history.
Now don't get me wrong: I gave this a decent amount of stars because the stories are entertaining, sometimes even surprising. But if character development matters to you, or you're an academic tired of certain tropes, it really isn't the collection for you.
This is a satirical look at academia. One gets the sense that, in many places, the author is making fun of the fact that some of our written record is made of voices like the one he chose. But Parker/Holt's idea of academia as masculine and unvarying ultimately killed the book for me. As a caricature of academia, Parker's cynical, lazy elitists are only slightly less cringeworthy than the stereotypical nearsighted, tweed-and-bow-tie professor. And when you have all of your characters repeating tired tropes about women without variation for your entire book, when all of your female characters are demons or victims or useless or dead, when you make it literally biological that women get magic later in life--sorry, you've failed. I'm a medievalist by training and a classicist by subsequent study--I can tell you there are voices we fail to hear here, and that was the unfortunate choice of the author, not a reflection of history.
Now don't get me wrong: I gave this a decent amount of stars because the stories are entertaining, sometimes even surprising. But if character development matters to you, or you're an academic tired of certain tropes, it really isn't the collection for you.