This book was very tongue in cheek and self aware, both about academia and publishing. Having read — and loved — the author’s previous book I expected that quippiness and was not let down. I think the narrative voice was the strongest point. It made the main character, Sam, and all the other characters feel very real, and was the perfect balance of funny, clever, and intelligent with a great attention to detail. For me the pacing slowed a bit halfway through, but all in all it was a solid self referential campus novel.

Thank you, Simon & Schuster and Netgalley, for providing this Advanced Reader's Copy in exchange for an honest review.

Have you ever read My Year of Rest and Relaxation and wondered what the protagonist would be like if she went into academia? I have not, but when reading this book, that was what I envisioned.
Adelmann combines sophisticated yet readable prose with the incredibly engaging narrative of things going wrong. Where do we put our locus of control? Is our adjuncting a fault of our own in part, or is it purely the result of modern academia being, well, Modern Academia? What are the ethical considerations of publishing autofiction that incriminates others? How do we know we have hit rock bottom? How many years of doing your PhD is too many?
Perhaps my favorite trope is when a book ends on a precipice, which is probably what made me think of MYORAR. After a series of unfortunate events and passivity, it is most powerful when the character takes action. Here, the structure of the post-factum diary, the first chapter/prologue that reveals the ending, makes us reflect on what led Sam to the precarious situation that is her life. Amazing work from Adelmann.

The Adjunct is a painfully accurate portrayal of the unfair labor practices in modern academia.

Adelmann's novel is a skewering of the campus novel in the guise of a campus novel. As protagonist Sam tries to navigate life hopping between temporary teaching jobs, campuses, would-be jobs, and would-be lovers, she observes the happy few who get to live the idyllic life those novels portray and exposes the degree to which their (often oblivious) happiness rests on the backs of an underpaid, overworked labor class created by the overproduction of PhDs competing for an increasingly small permanent job market.

For a reader who has been on both sides of the market, Sam's experiences ring painfully true, and while her uncertain hopping between lovers was frustrating at times, it did truly reflect the lack of certainty and lack of selfhood that adjuncting represents to her.

This was a strong five star for me up until the last 15%. As Sam finally comes to grip with the embodiment she has been struggling for, the story tips a bit too far into the unbelievable for my liking, but I acknowledge that may be a personal preference.

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the advanced reader copy provided in return for an honest review.

Really liked the prose, felt like it created a sense of anxiety in me that made me want to tear through this book. It started to wander a little bit in the second half, and I wasn’t sure what to expect in the end. I felt like balancing the exposition between Sam’s relationships with Tom, Gabe, and Sophie felt like just a little bit too much with the amount of text that we had. Although this is a bit bleak, I honestly feel like it would do well in a college syllabus. Adelmann paints a picture of academia that actually feels realistic.

Thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for the advanced reader copy.

Ugh. I wanted to like this book so much. I love a campus novel! The premise of this one felt like it could be an very interesting look into what it means to be a woman trying to break into the ever-shrinking professional world of academia. Unfortunately, this book just didn't come together. As a puzzle, it felt like all the pieces were just slightly off and didn't fit together. here were tangents about things that felt disconnected from the plot (or from increasing our understanding of the main character). This was a miss.

This is a confusing one. Everything about The Adjunct was fine. It's a perfectly good book that I'm sure other people will love, but it just didn't work for me. There were a lot of things I should have liked about this, and I can't even say they fell flat. They just feel neutrally? It was a bleak slice of life story that has no real resolution. I'm not even against that, but I think I just had different expectations.

Some of the academic talk was a bit lost on me, and I wasn't all that familiar with the other works quotes. Maybe that would have helped? I don't know.

As a semi-retired professor with a penchant for academic novels, I could not wait to read this book. It promised to be a contemporary skewering of the tragedy that academic life has become for so many in recent years. It delivered on its promise and more! Sam, the narrator, is a not-so-freshly minted literature Ph.D. adjuncting at two different schools and living on the poverty line, while hoping to manage her debts long enough to snag the gold ring of a tenure-track position. At the outset, the book appears to be a comic romp that offers humor while showcasing the challenges, indignities, and injustices of contingent employment as an adjunct instructor. However, partway into the book, one realizes that Sam's downward spiral has no end in sight. The indignities and injustices mount one upon the next, and each of her possibilities for escape seems to evaporate. The book successfully combines critiques of contingent university labor, predatory professors, the #me-too movement, and the cruel ironies of academic hierarchies. Having worked in three different universities/liberal arts colleges over the course of several decades, much of what Maria Adelman writes rings true, from aging professors seeking ego boosts via young students to adjunct faculty members barely making ends meet (even obliged to sleep in university offices). I wish that the main character (Sam) had been more appealing, as I think that would have made this a "hit the ball out of the park" contemporary academic novel, but unfortunately, she is pretty unlikeable. Even then, the fact that despite an unlikable main character, I stayed up way past my bedtime reading this book attests to this being a good read.

As a former adjunct, my first impression of The Adjunct was that it's a fun, gossipy foray into the world of schlepping between campuses and classes for what turns out to be less than minimum wage. For overworked adjunct Sam, Insult is added to injury when she runs into a former classmate, whose writing career has taken off while Sam's stagnates. I loved the spot-on characterization of Tom, the older male writer who has managed to write exactly zero books since the publication of his first novel, and has somehow translated that book into a cushy tenure track job. Adjuncts everywhere will recognize the one-book wonder holding court over generations of naive undergrads.

What begins as a satire about adjunct life, a campus novel about the campus novel, becomes, by the end, a take-down of the academic contract hire industry that rewards tenured and tenure-track professors with financial security and internal acclaim by relegating the adjuncts who do the lion's share of work to poverty. From the outside, of course, that insular acclaim and even the paycheck that goes with it seem hardly worth fighting for; in the real world, even the best academic salaries seem paltry, and the admiration some professors enjoy within their small kingdoms doesn't translate to admiration on the outside.

But I digress. The book begins as a comedy and devolves into an all-too-realistic tragedy. The darker it got, the more I admired it. Above all, it made me happy I left academia entirely in my mid-thirties when the MFA program where I had been an adjunct for years hired someone with no books and no teaching experience to fill a tenure-track position, even though several of the program's adjuncts had critically acclaimed books, NYT bestsellers, and years of teaching under our belts. The book should be required reading in every MFA program. The message--that the system is rigged and it's nearly impossible to make a living wage in academia--is more on point now than ever.

4.25

setting: Maryland
rep: queer protagonist

this isn't always an easy read - especially after about the 80% mark, as Sam's life spirals downwards more and more - but I enjoyed it, and there is a lot of very intellectual and interesting discussion in here about academia, sexuality, MeToo, the gig economy. Sam's life is ultimately a very depressing one. a must read if you're thinking of working in higher education in the USA!

In this raw and perhaps unprecedented take on a campus novel, the author lays out the perils of desirability in academia and the liminality of being an adjunct (and questioning your sexuality) in the style of chaotic girl literary fiction. I was entertained and genuinely stressed out for her. Girl save yourself from this spiral!

Thank you NetGalley and Scribner for the ARC.

I know the life of an English adjunct and I think Adelmann nailed it. I wish the protagonist had been more likeable, because it was hard to root for her, but I guess part of the point was that the life is so draining and exhausting that there is no room to be likeable.

Maria Adelmann has a strong writing style and worked as a fantasy element to it. I was invested in what was going on in this concept and thought this worked well as a character development. I was engaged with the plot and how it worked with the storyline, it had a unique premise and worked overall in this universe. I was invested in what was happening and thought the use of #MeToo worked well in the story.

I tried really hard to get into this but I think it’s a mood read for sure. I’ll give it another try at a better time.

I did not find this one as interesting as I hoped I would... I was irritated rather than engaged. I did not find "biting humor" so much as random oddness... I just couldn't connect to the characters or writing style.

Sam is a career adjunct professor at this point, hustling between a public university and a private U in Baltimore. A traumatic experience with her advisor at the name school she was completing her Ph.D at set her back years and she is still trying to regroup. As she teaches other professor's syllabi. she cobbles together a halfhearted existence. This all comes to a head when she sees the professor, her advisor on her campus. Dr. Tom Sternberg, the charismatic, old-boy frat bro prof has been expelled from the Private U due to complaints. He had surfed on his bestselling novel about his life in his twenties for many years but has finally written the follow up. The problem is the follow up features Sam.

Suddenly all the adjuncts and professors are gossiping and Sam is losing her grip.
Maria Adelmann offers a fresh twist on the campus novel with plenty of bite. It may be a little too real these days, but a stellar work of writing. #scribner #campusnovel

The Adjunct by Maria Adelmann is an essential addition to the campus novel genre that tackles themes of class exploitation, identity, and feminism with refreshing, and often humorous, directness.

Like our protagonist Sam, I once had a dream of becoming a humanities professor. I loved academia and teaching; I couldn’t imagine a cooler job. My academic mentors alternately encouraged and discouraged me from pursuing a PhD: they knew it would be an amazing path for my abilities and interests, but they also knew how minimal my chances at tenure-track employment would be. I heard horror story upon horror story about the academic job market, and I remember feeling shocked when I realized that one of my adjunct professors was teaching seven classes in one semester—like Sam, across two campuses—while raising two children and battling cancer. The shock grew when I learned that adjuncts only get paid a couple thousand dollars per class and receive no benefits. That’s about $250 per week for a job that demands an exorbitant amount of time and effort. Reading The Adjunct was like glimpsing into a dark alternate pathway in which I “followed my dreams” and got that history PhD.

Sam is in her mid-thirties and working as an adjunct for several classes to scrape by in hopes of eventually securing an elusive tenure-track (or at least full-time lecturer) position. Her life is a constant scrabble to avoid homelessness as living expenses, student loan debt, and medical bills stack up. On top of her destitution, she feels misplaced in the #MeToo era that demands clear categorization of identity. Her past comes back to haunt her when she discovers she is working at the same university as her old grad school advisor, Tom, with whom she had a close relationship in graduate school. Their relationship inhabited a sort of murkiness at odds with the clean-cut narratives of the #MeToo movement; while it never quite veered into a sexual relationship and took place between two adults, their differences in age and power left Sam feeling used and betrayed. Her thoughts and feelings on their relationship come to a head when she learns Tom has published a fictional novel that appears to be based on their relationship.

Adelmann very much uses The Adjunct as a soapbox for her takes on the exploitations of adjuncts, the broken academic system, and the complex, invisible webs of power that ensnare the vulnerable even in an age of increased “awareness” and “visibility.” Her takes are insightful and incisive—she holds nothing back, but it never feels preachy. The gaps in our literary consciousness she’s addressing are real, and her skilled writing adds urgency and depressing hilarity to her message. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex ways patriarchal and capitalist power reshapes itself in a modern academic context.


Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for providing me with an advanced reader copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was a bleak read. I was intrigued by the idea of using an ambiguous instance of a student-professor relationship to think through the subtleties of consent and responsibility. Adelmann’s prose is clean and evocative, Sam’s voice is distinctive and strong, and I really appreciated that this novel swung for the fences—trying to encompass a meta-critique of the campus novel, a reassessment of #MeToo, an excoriation of adjunct exploitation—this ultimately felt far more like the latest in a long line of “drift fic” (think My Year of Rest and Relaxation”), where a disaffected female protagonist struggles to find her place and herself. Although Sam ruthlessly and painstakingly explores her ambivalence (her discomfort with embodiment, her difficulties with emotional entanglements, her sexuality), I found the endless equivocation hard going. The novel is best in its vivid depiction of the precarity of the adjunct hustle: the overscheduling, endless grind of job hunting, dirty temporary offices, staggered and insufficient paychecks. The final chapter left me feeling as ground down as Sam was: an apt ending, but one that left a sour taste in my mouth. This didn’t quite land for me, but I appreciated the prose and the insight into the adjunct experience.

I’m not really sure about this one. It seemed like a story with no real plot and no real resolution, just a stream of consciousness from the narrator. It started off sad, and by the end it was just even sadder.

Sam starts out with a new job as an adjunct professor at a couple colleges and while it’s not a promising path, she at least makes a little money for bills. Unfortunately she ends up working at the same college as an older professor she had a fling with in school, who may have written a book about her, and it makes everything awkward. By the end of the book, Sam’s lost her job, her home, and all her friends so it’s just sad.

I didn’t find Sam particularly likable, but none of the characters really were. And I still wanted things to work out for her in the end. I also really didn’t like that she ended up with the professor who started her whole downhill spiral.

Thought provoking. Audacious. Courageous. Satirical. Tragic.

THE ADJUNCT by Maria Adelmann is all of these things and more. Her tragicomic novel is that all too rare work that preys upon your emotions. The story will challenge everything you thought you knew. When you are finished reading the book, it will have changed you.

Adelmann successfully confronts a number of complex themes / topics, including the campus novel, the state of literature, the generational divide, the value of a college education / degree, family, friendship, mentorship, politics, sexual politics, sexuality, sexual identity, #MeToo, feminism pre- and post-#MeToo, gender identity, and most importantly, socioeconomic status, political and economic blindness, labor exploitation, desperation, and America. Because as Adelmann’s protagonist, Sam, an adjunct professor working at multiple colleges teaching way too many classes just to earn a living, explains late in the novel — in her confession, “I am trying to tell you something, not just about my life but about America.” This is the opening line of one of the most important paragraphs in the entire work that is sure to ignite a passionate debate among book clubs and literary elites. Not to mention the ending that many are sure to find controversial, right as Sam finds her all too elusive “climax.”

When I first started reading Adelmann’s novel, I was smiling and laughing along, because I could identify with a lot of what Sam was enduring based on my own background as an adjunct.

Passages like “Hemingway gave way to Cheever gave way to David Foster Wallace gave way to Jonathan Franzen” are sure to have undergraduate and graduate English majors nodding along and laughing.

And when Sam describes a more successful colleague’s book, Adelmann writes, “The book was ‘autofiction’ — that is, a memoir with fewer potential legal issues and more clout — about the pressures of attending a private high school in Hollywood with the children of celebrities. It was also about how she’d always been bullied for being naturally skinny and about how much E she’d done while nonetheless maintaining an A average and getting into Yale.” The passage reads like a creative writing seminar critique.

There are the quips such as, “Creative writers have a habit of thinking every other literary professional is just a failed novelist.”

And then there are the students with whom Sam interacts. My Lord, the students!

However, as the book progressed, I wasn’t smiling as Sam’s story turned devastating. Sam admits, “Intuition was what I was missing, not just in art but in life.”

A series of catastrophes unfolds in the book’s third act that will have some readers laughing (at what they will see as sheer absurdity) and others sympathizing, scared over what more Adelmann will compel her protagonist to endure.

THE ADJUNCT is a diary; it is a confession; it is fictional auto-fiction; it is a dark satire; it is a Shakespearean tragedy. Most of all, it is a masterpiece. Adelmann’s novel should be required reading. It is destined to be considered one of the best books of 2026 and, if there is any justice in literary circles, an awards contender.

This novel offers a thoughtful, if sometimes uneven, exploration of life in the precarious world of adjunct academia. Sam’s story — juggling multiple jobs, stalled career hopes, and complicated relationships — feels authentic and relatable, especially for readers familiar with the instability and politics of higher education.

The tension with her former adviser, Tom, adds a compelling layer, particularly as rumors swirl that she inspired a character in his new novel. While the premise is strong, the pacing occasionally drags, and some romantic subplots feel underdeveloped compared to the central academic conflict.

Still, the book captures the exhaustion, ambition, and quiet resilience of someone trying to shape a future under less-than-ideal circumstances. It’s a solid character study that will resonate most with readers drawn to campus novels and stories about reclaiming one’s narrative.

The publisher provided ARC via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.