Stephanie Land's new memoir Class, spans her senior year of college, when, for a time, she subsisted on peanut butter and grape juice. She also noticed parallels between her experience as a low-income college student and her daughter's experience as the kindergarten-age child of a low-income mother. "I saw how difficult it was just to get myself physically to class," she said, citing a broken-down car, exhaustion, lack of food, and the stress that compounded all of those things. Land's experience is increasingly common in real life, but rarely seen in fiction. We often associate the phrase "campus novel" with coming-of-age stories set in the constructed reality of a cloistered campus bubble. But for many of today's students, the stakes are higher. And now, those stakes are starting to appear on the page. |
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