i'd forgotten i'd read this until i was reminded by another lolita-the-student scene. ugh.

remember how francince prose told us that today's students are stupid because maya angelou is required reading? the way prose tried to manipulate the political landscape (anti political correctness as a ticket into the boys club, right?) makes me think thoughts both unkind and un[bullshit 2nd wave]feminist.

I read nearly twenty years ago when I was going through a huge teacher-student erotic romance book phase. I'd begun to wonder about it lately, and was glad when a Goodreads member helped me find it again. The cover makes it clear this is supposed to be a dark comedy, if that makes sense. I certainly picked up on the first page that it was supposed to be a dark comedy. None of the jokes land at all. The title is such for a stupid, self-indulgent reason. The novel has several of my least favorite tropes and factors: racism, tokenism, misogyny, blaming and shaming domestic violence victims, cheating, novel within a novel, oh noetry within a novel, writing workshops within a novel, and being gratuitously shocking. Trigger warnings also include graphic descriptions of mentioned bestiality, necrotic bestiality, child sexual abuse and other child abuse. This book aged POORLY. Wow.

If readers want to skip to the sex, it only happens once and is on pages 168 to 169 in the edition I read. You are not missing anything else in the whole book. There's no real plot and everyone except Sherrie sucks. This book isn't racy at all. It's barely even sexual. There's no UST, no buildup, no relationship beforehand, and the professor literally thinks smugly, "I knew this would happen, just like I--" and flatly describes the foreplay in a run-on sentence for nearly a paragraph devoid of any eroticism. The sex is brief and seems dissatisfying for both parties, or such is the lackluster and hurried description. Wham bam thank you ma'am is an apt description.

In a "blink and you miss it" moment, Angela mentions her dorm-mates find her "insane" for having so many celeb photos. Keep dramatizing yourself, sweetie. When I was eighteen and in undergrad, my dorm-mate plastered a whole shared hallway plus shared bathroom with movie posters, comics, magazine ads featuring celebrities, a large blank paper for us all to draw on, and such. All shapes and sizes. The rest of us thought it was awesome. So your pictures are a non-issue. For the record, I'm goth and have been since I was twelve, and you're an alterna-teen but okay. It's not just how her professor described her, either. This annoyed me.

The dude whines a -lot-, and we spend the whole book inside his yammering, chatty, trying so hard to be deep but just being whiny and varying shades of lilac, violet, wisteria, and also some other purples so deep they're closer to black. Nothing freakin' happens in this book! This isn't a teacher-student book, it's a whiny middle-aged guy drooling and panting over a girl his daughter's age. The book keeps pointing out this fact. One of Angela's works is described as "Lolita" from Lolita's perspective. Twenty years later, "My Dark Vanessa" came out. Please read that one; it approaches the topic with the gravity it deserves.

When Swenson faces negative consequences, he cannot stop calling Angela a bitch and using other terrible language about women in general. I read a blurb that compared Swenson's hearing for sexual harassment to the Salem Witch Trials. Whoever made that comparison should never be respected again and never be able to be sexually aroused ever again. Why were all those students at the hearing? Why did it go on for so long? It was written just as blandly as the rest of the book. Angela tells lies upon lies at the hearing, and gets her friends to lie for her. I don't know why I was surprised, considering the tone of this book. I cheered Sherrie on when she was furious with her husband for manipulating a student into sex, and so glad when she informed him of a possible divorce. When he whined, I laughed.

This book is mean-spirited and later hateful. Not at all a satire or darkly comedic. It's just pointless. ( )

I'm not sure why the author bothered to write Blue Angel. The protagonist isn't terribly interesting or sympathetic, there wasn't much of a plot, and I expected to enjoy the writing more. The book did have some laugh-out-loud moments, however. Meh... ( )

Blue Angel is nearly as mind-bendingly disturbing and impossible to put down as Gone Girl, but so much better. The small-scale drama of Professor Ted Swenson's dalliance with student Angela Argo at Vermont's Euston College resonates with all sorts of layered meanings, and goes down like a delicious milkshake spiked with ground-up glass. Francine Prose leaves no doubt that Angela is a fascinating sociopath, but she casts a much wider net than that. While leaving the reliability of Ted's perspective on the story a hanging question, Prose pokes wry fun at the mores of modern academia, and questions its (and our) assumptions about the balance of power in relationships and what constitutes a victim, while sprinkling plenty of titillating breadcrumbs on her trail. I deduct a half a star (which isn't possible on Goodreads, so a full star) for some overly predictable plot twists towards the end. ( )

The novel Blue Angel by Francine Prose is a contemporary novel whose plot and tone are loosely based on the 1930 Marlene Dietrich tragicomedic German film, The Blue Angel. Its hapless protagonist is Ted Swenson, a creative writing professor at Euston, a small, second-tier, liberal arts college in Vermont. He's also published a successful semi-autobiographical novel, Blue Angel, and has been unproductively working on another one for years. But writer's block is the least of Swenson's problems. From an outside perspective, he seems to have it pretty good, a secure tenured position, a loving wife who he remains attracted to, a country home, a middle-class life. But at 47, he's bored and annoyed by his untalented students, loathes all but one of his professorial colleagues, seems not particularly suited to life in the New England boondocks and is otherwise ripe for a self-destructive mid-life crisis. Enter Angela Argo, a skinny, awkward, leather-clad and pierced, punkish student who can actually write. And the theme of her novel - yes you've got it - a liaison between a high school student and her teacher. Prose's strength is the humor she brings to describing the pretensions of academia, political correctness, and gender politics, and the fun she pokes at students and professors alike. But underneath the winks and nods and satire, is a sad and cautionary tale of self-destruction and confusion. As in Shakespeare, the line between tragedy and comedy is indeed thin. ( )