Young Again

What would it feel like to find your middle-aged self suddenly living back in a college dorm room? Four faculty members at Prairie State College in Minnesota are about to find out after their administration comes up with a bizarre strategy to improve graduation rates -- The Faculty Dorm Dweller Program. While the idea seems promising to the administration, it doesn't take long for problems to arise--problems which readers will find appallingly funny, situations they'll find stimulate both empathy and snark. As Johnson says, "It's not so much a fish-out-of-water scenario as it is an older fish returning to a pond she'd lived in years ago." So Juanita Jane Ruckler, a fiftyish English professor, proves that she's not old by having an affair with a nineteen-year-old student. Lyla Benson, recently divorced and thirty-eight, runs into her old college flame and finds herself searching: is there something more than ashes left in that relationship? Bert Rojas, a math professor, is using the program to escape a boring home life with a nagging wife--the woman he's married right after college, back when youth had seemed eternal. As the FDD crew gets to know one another, they provide balance, experience, and understanding to one another. Even fresh-faced and naive young Joy McPherson, assistant professor in Political Science, can sometimes teach her older colleagues--though her own choices seem inexorably wrong. And the students? They're teachers too, in their own inimitable ways.