Drop and Add

Eastern Technical College was not his first choice. That’s where Eliot Becker goes to teach English. As a new adjunct instructor, he’s assigned one class, “the worst class with the worst students at the worst time of day.” Eliot rents an apartment in a nearby one-stoplight farm town. For extra money he takes a job at the local grocery store and sings in an all-falsetto group at a nearby county bar. The students he teaches are under-prepared. They work, they take on debt, they struggle, they want to make good. What’s good? Can he help them? What are the odds of getting a full-time position at Eastern Tech? Can he learn to feel at home in a farm town? What does he really want?

Readers of the ARC said:

"I have only one issue with Rick Bailey’s Drop and Add. I didn’t want it to end!”

“Plenty of humorous release and spot-on dialogue. I read it in four sittings, eagerly coming back to it each time.”

“I love the way Eliot sweetens on life in Freeland, how he's open to it, as he's open to his students. All the lifelike, slightly eccentric small-town characters he gets to know through bagging at Pat's, or going to potato festivals, or just walking the streets—terrific.”

"“The characterization of the college community is so real. I know those old fart teachers and middle-aged women. (I also know the young creative and full-hearted ones.) I know the jaded ones, the drinking ones, the fed-up ones, the ones who love “rules” and committees and the dedicated others.”