Title: The Teachers’ Room*
Author: Lydia Stryk
Rating: 3.75 stars / 5 stars
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Favorite Quote: “I’d lick her heart if I could, feast on her lungs, her brain. There’s something cannibalistic about love, I’m finding.” Lydia Stryk, The Teachers’’ Room, E-Book Ed. Bywater Books, 2022.
Review: Thank you to the publisher, Bywater Books, and the Edelweiss platform, for the free e-ARC I received in exchange for an honest review.
This. Book. Is. Incredible. (I know the 3.75 rating might be a little off-putting, and I promise to explain.) But, first and foremost, this book is truly a masterpiece. Stryk captures moments of fear, moments of passion, moments of humanity laid bare, in a novel set in the past but is often so reminiscent of the present.
The Teachers’ Room follows the narrator/protagonist Karen as she begins her first year teaching alongside seasoned teacher and [SPOILER ALERT] lover Esther. This book takes place in 1960s small-town America in a swiftly changing social and political atmosphere. Karen, the protagonist, appears to have grown up relatively sheltered in a strict Catholic family, while Esther’s history, learned in fragments, is one of Jewish family torn apart by [TRIGGER WARNING AND SPOILER ALERT] the Holocaust and its after effects. The novel follows their love story and its seemingly inevitable end, all the while interspersed with Karen’s struggles as a new professional, insights into her complicated relationship with sex and her sexuality, and the emotional tumult of living in an era where one’s love is not only stigmatized by illegal.
There is so much about this book that I love and cherish. It is one that I will return to time and time again, I’m sure. Stryk’s language is vivid and striking, often leaving the reader breathless with its ferocity. An incomplete list of my favorite quotes to prove this point:
“They know the story of the Cowboys and Indians. They know the white man always wins.”
“It’s exciting, as odd as it may seem, to love a near perfect stranger.”
“Pay more attention to the girls, she advises. Boys are loud and dominate the classroom. We favor them, just like the world does. We make excuses for their behavior, because boys are good-natured and don’t take things personally and never hold grudges. But the girls need our help, too, and rarely get it. They hold things in. They take everything to heart and never forget. WHat they don’t do, as a rule, is make their presence felt.”
“The best thing of all is not to be born.”
“We commit crimes of passion and then some. We break the laws of nature, blast safes and steal treasures, ransack and lay waste to all that remains and set ourselves on fire.”
“How easy it is to destroy a life or two, casually, in the course of an otherwise harmless conversation. A bit of gossip passed on becomes a missile aimed with deadly force at its target.”
Stryk’s talent, then, is clearly in her capturing the subtle tragedies of life and living.
So, what wasn’t working? There are really only two criticisms I have of this book (but one of them is among my least favorite tropes and kept me from rating this book either 4 or 5, even though most of the book does, in fact, fall into that genre of rating).
The first of my criticisms is that Stryk doesn’t always do enough laying the groundwork/foreshadowing for the “surprises” that occur in the book. What makes a literary surprise fun and fitting for a novel is the reader’s ability to look back and see the clues that led to the surprise. Moments like Karen’s [SPOILER ALERT] engagement that was mentioned and disposed of in a few short pages was one such example where there simply wasn’t enough groundwork laid to make the twist actually make sense.
As for my other criticism…I just genuinely don’t like the [FINAL SPOILER ALERT I PROMISE] surprise pregnancy trope. Anytime it pops up in books that I’m reading, I’m likely to just DNF the book. Which I didn’t do with this book, because I otherwise loved it. But that particular twist really did pull me out of the narrative quite a bit. That said, I did appreciate the depiction of the historical conditions under which women were forced to seek abortions. (This was one of many moments that showed parallels between historical America and contemporary America.)
About that Quote: This book is a love story but it’s not a romance, and I think this quote captures that dynamic. This book is heart wrenching and at times violent in its anger and disappointment and terror. There’s love, sure. Karen loves Esther and Esther loves Karen. But there isn’t a happy ending, as there so often isn’t in love. And this book, and this quote, captures the violence and tragedy of love, especially forbidden love
TW for The Teachers’ Room (probably an incomplete list): anti-Semitism, flashbacks to the Holocaust, unsafe abortion practices, homophobia, forced outing, infidelity
Have you read The Teachers’ Room? Share your thoughts below!
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