The bigotry on show feels a little over the top for how I remember things, but having grown up in deep red Florida, I can tell you it's not that far off. I was just wrapping up high school and entering college during the year this book covers. And if you're into slow boil tension, um, yeah. Having said that, I do think it was actually really well handled in this book.

Molly is a post-grad working on her PhD, who is out and proud, and stumbles across Carmen's secret.īeing a former teacher myself, I'm not into teacher/student romance and the power imbalances there. Carmen is a deeply closeted statistics professor, whose demeanor and decisions come from the constant fear of outing herself in her hostile work environment. Set against the late 90s backdrop of the anti-gay backlash in the US after Ellen came out on her show, this story finds Carmen and Molly navigating casual and overt bigotry in a university PoliSci program. The thing is, as the chemistry builds between them, Molly isn't sure she wants to be a grad student anymore.if she ever did.The Love Factor by Quinn Ivins. But she absolutely refuses to get involved with a student.

As the two women work together to make their case, they grow closer than Carmen ever imagined. She has no intention of coming out, least of all to Molly, a troublemaking grad student who can't stop picking fights with the conservative faculty.īut when Molly discovers evidence implicating a homophobic colleague in a scandal, Carmen can't ignore it-even if the subject hits too close to home. Professor Carmen Vaughn is stuck in small-town Maryland with smarmy blowhards for colleagues and ungrateful students who can't handle her high standards. Molly decides to give a PhD a whirl but finds herself more interested in campus politics.and her strict and sexy statistics professor. It might be the nineties, and everything's shoulder pads, Doc Martens, and The X-Files, but people won't budge on gay rights. Molly Cook is almost thirty, with dismal career prospects, and has given up on saving the world. A smart, opposites-attract, student-professor romance filled with nostalgia, edgy politics, and the forbidden thrills of lesbian love in the nineties.