Claire Qu reviews Love & Virtue by Diana Reid
Love & Virtue
By Diana Reid
ISBN 9781761150111
Reviewed by CLAIRE QU
The prim and vaguely Austenian title of Diana Reid’s debut novel offers a tongue-in-cheek self-description consistent with the book’s plentiful irony. Many labels could be applied to it: campus novel, bildungsroman, #MeToo novel, story of contemporary female friendship. Perhaps that is why it is so constantly self-aware, so unremitting in its parody of all the stock characters – the insecure freshmen, urbane professors, greasy suitors, and smugly ‘liberated’ women – that people these genres.
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