Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members ***

Dear Committee Members is a comic novel that consists entirely of letters of recommendation written by a cranky and delusional English professor. It's an appetizer of a book that you can read in one or two sittings, breezing quickly through the short "chapters."

I found it amusing but not laugh-out-loud funny. The best bits came when our narrator Dr Fitger tries to communicate the opposite of a recommendation:

Professor Franklin Kentrell has a singular mind and a unique approach to the discipline. He is sui generis. The Davidson Chair has never seen his like before.

I also liked how so many of Fitger's students wrote stories about tentacled monsters, cannibals, gun-wielding arachnids, and so on. I was less fond of the pseudo letters of recommendation he wrote to his colleagues at Payne College: they stretched the bounds of the conceit past the breaking point.