Adoration & Animus is a life-long love story commencing in the fall of 2016 and extending to the year 2073, albeit with a multi-decade hiatus. It’s also a story about politics, mostly the politics of the Trump era. It’s a coming-of-age novel; it’s a campus novel. It’s all of the above. During a chance morning meeting on the campus quad before the 2016-17 academic year begins, two incoming freshmen meet -- multi-talented, hyper-politically minded, dog-loving, Russian-born but New Jersey-grown Sasha Rochinksy; and Adam Bond, a boy grounded in the physical world, who, spurred by his sister’s suicide, is intent on discovering a universal pharmacologic cure for depression. Fueled in part by a mutual disdain for the reality TV star who is elected president that fall, the two develop a strong romantic bond despite having vastly different academic interests. After more than two years together, though, with Sasha away for a semester abroad in London, Adam “celebrates” with Samantha, his lab partner, over her acceptance to medical school. Although he does manage to walk away that evening just shy of committing, in Sasha’s terminology, an impeachable offense, the whole episode leaves him confused and uncertain. One year later, with an imaginary devil of his own making planting ideas in his head, he does the unthinkable -- he breaks up with Sasha. Almost immediately, he tries to undo it but finds it’s not amenable to a do-over. Berating himself for months and years afterwards, the self-descriptive term idiot often passes through his mind. Nearly twenty-five years later, in 2044, with the world in serious trouble from climate change, and after another populist demagogue is elected president of the United States, Sasha literally walks into Adam’s life again...