Unhallowed Halls

Lili Wilkinson just gets better and better, she is right at the top of her game (disclaimer: we've been friendly for years, she lives near me and we run into each other sometimes). Over the course of her writing career, she has produced delightful rom-coms, gripping realist novels about cults and apocalypse, and lately she's turned to chunky volumes of fantasy, all of which have been standalone stories with a fresh world and magic each time. Gee, she's good.

Unhallowed Halls has been deservedly shortlisted for the CBCA Book of the Year, and at this stage (without having read all the shortlisted books), I hope it wins. It's a terrific tale of elemental magic, set in a remote Scottish school for troubled, rich teenagers (surely there is a nod to Hogwarts here). Page has been brought from Florida to Agathion on a scholarship -- but why? Among a host of gifted adolescents, her gift is a particularly dark and mysterious one. For the first time in her life, Page finds herself part of a friendship group, and even falling in love with a boy. But a web of lies and a horrifying history of deception and murder lies beneath Agathion's seductive surface.

There is a lot of body-swapping in this story and Wilkinson does a stellar job of helping the reader keep track of whose soul is inhabiting who, and when. Underlying the plot (and surely this too might be a gesture toward the weird cruel creature that JK Rowling has become) is a concern with minds, souls and bodies -- are they, and can they be, split? What if mind and body don't feel as if they belong together? Is the body a gross flesh machine to be despised and mortified, or a gift to be relished? These deep questions are wrapped in a thoroughly thrilling and often beautiful fantasy tale that weaves together the boarding school, magic, romance and sacrifice in a fresh and gorgeous way.
 

I Hope This Doesn't Find You

Next on my list of the CBCA Older Readers Notables is Ann Liang's I Hope This Doesn't Find You. Since I began this list, the official shortlist for the awards has been released, and it includes three books I've already read -- A Wreck of Seabirds, Birdy, and Comes the Night. I was disappointed that Deep Is the Fen missed out -- I wish Lili Wilkinson would get more recognition from awards committees.

I Hope This Doesn't Find You didn't make the shortlist cut, either, but my friend Cathy who is a librarian at a girls' school tells me Ann Liang's books absolutely fly off the shelves, so maybe she doesn't need any extra help! This novel centres on high-achieving, self-effacing private schoolgirl Sadie Wen, who has endured a ten year rivalry with her co-school captain, the insufferable (but weirdly hot) Julius Gong. Julius inspires such strong emotions in Sadie -- it's because they hate each other, right? Right?

I found this book a bit of a weird reading experience because, although Liang explicitly says it's set in Melbourne, it seems to float in a strange unanchored American-ish location, where there is a palm-lined beach two hours from the city, people say Mom and math, students aspire to attend Harvard and Berkeley and older brothers live in college dorms. I found this disorienting, but Cathy assures me it works for Liang's young readers. For me, the will-they, won't-they romance took a while to get going, and I was more interested in perfectionist Sadie's urge to control and solve every problem, while never admitting to any weakness in herself. Her dilemma is symbolised early in the novel when a secret cache of draft rage-emails are unwittingly sent to the whole school, and everyone learns what Sadie is really thinking.
 

Prep

It's official: my mild crush on Curtis Sittenfeld has turned into a full-blown passion. Her smash debut novel, Prep, which is surely at least semi-autobiographical, follows diffident, middle class, Mid-western student Lee as she navigates a posh East Coast boarding school. I never wanted this novel to end. I was totally absorbed in Lee's agonising social awkwardness, her desperate attempts to fit in. As someone tells her towards the end of the book, 'You should have realised you're not that weird, or that being weird is not that bad.' (I'm paraphrasing.)  

Lee's experience at boarding school reminded me of my own life at residential college. At one point, Lee begins cutting people's hair; it gives her a social role, a confidence, an identity. That reminded me of the way I used to tell fortunes for my fellow students with tarot cards. The section where Lee faces expulsion from the school because she's failing pre-calcuus was viscerally distressing (mind you, I can't see how she could go from utter bafflement to a B or C the next year without ever actually understanding what she'd missed). The stakes are very low throughout -- no one's life is ever at stake -- but Lee's misery and joy are so closely observed that we feel her pain and delight in our own body.

I was fascinated to discover that Ault, the posh school in the novel, was based on Groton School in Connecticut which Sittenfeld herself attended, and which in turn featured as a filming location in the movie The Holdovers, which I watched over summer. So I can summon up some images of Lee's beautiful, traditional school surroundings. It was those images that she first fell in love with, just like I fell in love with the Oxford-style (or so I assumed) buildings of my college. Mind you, the students at my college didn't have ridiculous names like Horton, Aspeth, Gates (girls) Cross, Devin, and McGrath (boys). That's first names, not surnames, just to be clear.

Curtis Sittenfeld has just released a collection of short stories, which includes one featuring the characters from Prep. I'm in two minds about whether to read it, because I've heard mixed opinions, but I bet I won't be able to resist.

 

The Things That Matter Most

I heard Gabbie Stroud talking on the radio about her new book, The Things That Matter Most, but I must have only been half-listening because I didn't pick up that it's fiction, not non-fiction. Stroud is an ex-teacher and has already written a couple of non-fiction books on the subject, so perhaps that's where my confusion arose.

This is a terrific, lively, easy to engage with novel which starkly dramatises the issues teachers face --overwhelmed with box-ticking, pointless admin and besieged by demanding parents and media, as well as their own personal dramas, they find themselves with less and less time to really connect with the students themselves. As one small family falls through the cracks, each staff member at the primary school sees part of the picture, a couple of little clues, but because there is no space or time to put it all together, the result is a tragedy.

Teachers have a really tough time, and they shoulder the blame and responsibility for a lot of social problems that really shouldn't need to be their core business. They work bloody hard and they don't get paid nearly enough. The system is cracking under the weight. In the course of my working life, I see a lot of very well-resourced schools, with amazing staff and wonderful facilities, but I'm well aware that there are also amazing staff in schools with leaking classrooms and outdated computers. It's not good enough. All our children deserve the very best -- thank God that teachers do the incredible work that they do, but we need to reward them properly.
 

The Gaps

 

Reading Leanne Hall's superb young adult novel, The Gaps, was a multi-layered experience for me. Set in a girls' private school, Balmoral, The Gaps explores the effect of the abduction of one of the students, Yin Marshall, on two of her classmates, popular Natalia (who used to be Yin's best friend) and newcomer Chloe.

The Gaps is sensitive and nuanced, tracing the ripples of Yin's abduction on the school community, the survivor guilt, the pain of uncertainty, the prurient horror, and the trauma of loss. Hall is especially good at sketching in the wider social background through which these teenage girls move -- the white noise of stranger danger, unsolicited male attention, body policing, social media pressure, advertising. Chloe and Natalia are two very different characters but their responses to Yin's disappearance are truthful and powerful. 

The extra layers for me came from the fact that Leanne Hall and I went to the same school (a few years apart), and the geography of 'Balmoral' was intimately familiar to me -- the quadrangle, the walkways, the bathrooms near the science labs, the Great Hall. (In fact, my house was called Balmoral...) And our school did experience a tragic abduction some years after my time. Even though I'd left the school and didn't know anyone involved, I did feel a particular stab of horror and protectiveness around that event  just because we'd worn the same school uniform. 

Maybe that awareness gave The Gaps an added depth for me, but even without that shared background, this is a very accomplished, layered and heartfelt novel, perfectly pitched and perfectly timed. Highly recommended.

Finding Cassie Crazy

I first discovered Jaclyn Moriarty through her Colours of Madeleine fantasy trilogy (thank you, Suzanne!), which was the freshest, most inventive fantasy trilogy I've read for many years. I wasn't sure if her earlier books, centred around students at two Sydney private schools and strictly realist, would have the same appeal, but I'm delighted to report that Finding Cassie Crazy is just as much fun as the fantasy novels.

In fact, my friend Bridget and I recently bonded over a mutual love of Jaclyn Moriarty, before realising that I had read only the fantasy books while Bridget had read only the school ones. Moriarty weaves a lively, funny tale from several strands of plot and several engaging voices, and she always tucks in a few surprise twists along the way. Told through letters, emails, school notices and diary entries, this book was an absolute pleasure to read.

Finding Cassie Crazy is one of four novels loosely centred around Ashbury and Brookfield schools. Now I have to get hold of the others!

The Girls of the Rookery School

Ethel Talbot has been safely dead for seventy five years, so I'm sure I won't offend her when I say that her 1932 novel The Girls of the Rookery School is NOT a good book.

Just look at that gawp, Peggy, on the cover, with her gormless expression and the cricket ball hidden in her hand. Do you think it's possible that this sickly dweeb, expressly forbidden to play games after fainting while running across the Downs near her new school, could ever secretly develop a gift for tricky left handed bowling? Do you think that said dweeb might get the chance to save the day in the very last match of the season, against the 'literal Amazons' of Dean House, when her best chum Irene has to be subbed out with smashed glasses? Do you think that the very sporting captain of the Dean House team will agree to allow the opposition team mascot to bowl the last few balls of the match, so that Peggy can skittle their best batsman? You bet she will, despite the fact that, while batting substitutions are a long-established tradition in cricket, bowling substitutions are, to say the least, unusual.

But that's the least of the implausibilities in a plot which contains a stolen ruby, yokels who speak in laborious dialect ("Rookses is queery birdies, to be zure, liddle missie..."), a long-ago scandal and students who are so terrified of an Inspector's visit that they speak of little else for a whole term. We are told about five times in the opening chapters that the character of Polly is always called "Flinders", after which she is called Flinders ONCE and otherwise known to everyone as... Polly.

There is also this priceless passage:

 Polly was telling everything before another moment had passed. All about the last weeks' unhappiness. In the cloakroom their arms were round each other; their hot cheeks were pressed together; they were kissing each other for the first time.

Alas, it's not another contender for Jenny Pausacker's excellent list, just a rather over-heated reconciliation.

Oh, and does Peggy find the lost ruby? What do you think?

A World of Girls... In the Kitchen?

Attentive followers of my 'What I'm Reading' list will have noticed that I've been devouring lots of old-fashioned girls' stories lately, especially the ballet books of Lorna Hill (which probably deserve their own post). This was partly prompted by my picking up Rosemary Auchmuty's A World of Girls from the last library book sale. This was a fascinating analysis of the enduring appeal of girls' school stories (think The Chalet School, The Abbey Girls series etc) in the face of (male) derision and jolly-hockey-sticks satire. Auchmuty contends that these books, despite some dodgy elements, nevertheless provided their young readers with a picture of a world where women thrived, independent of men, and had real, loving relationships with each other.

I was never a huge consumer of school stories (apart from Antonia Forest, who, with respect, is in another league entirely from the authors discussed here), but Auchmuty's description of one particular book made me sit up. In Dorita Fairlie Bruce's Prefects At Springdale, the different houses of Springdale compete to show their special strengths -- one house gives a concert, another shows off their prowess in foreign languages etc. Wistaria House decides to go in for Domestic Science, and puts on a dinner party, which ends up winning them the prize.

'Hang on,' I thought, 'this sounds familiar...' and sure enough, a search of my mother's bookshelves revealed a battered copy of Prefects At Springdale, awarded to Mum as a Sunday School prize in 1948 (twelve years after its original publication).

Auchmuty's book contains a whole section on the topic of Domestic Science and its role in the school story genre. Especially after the female freedoms of the two World Wars, there was a concerted political push to encourage girls to be educated in the science of home-making, to nudge them back into their 'proper' domestic sphere. This was a source of some ambivalence in women's education and also in the school stories, though in Prefects, Dorita Bruce comes down firmly in support of girls being taught to cook and mange a household (though the actual cleaning, one gathers, would probably still be performed by the servants!)

Rosemary Auchmuty applauds (with reservations) the attempt to revalue 'women's work' by making it more 'scientific', but laments the way that girls were forced to cram in Domestic Science on top of the normal (male) curriculum of sports and academic subjects. 

Having won the competition, Wistaria is awarded with their trophy -- a bonsai cedar tree. As Auchmuty points out:

Of all the images that could have been chosen to symbolise women's position under patriarchy, it would be difficult to find one more apt than this. A bonsai tree is something which is beautiful, certainly, but stunted, reduced to ornamental status to stand on a domestic shelf, certainly not fit to take its place in the might forest of real trees.

Of course, back then, Domestic Science was a subject taught only to girls. These days, Home Economics should probably be compulsory for everyone (my friend Elizabeth, who is studying to be a Home Ec teacher, might agree with this view). All students can benefit from learning about nutrition, environmental sustainability and the economics of household management. In a world of scarce resources and climate change, this is stuff we all need to know: how to live responsibly and sustainably, how the personal decisions we make about how we live (what we eat, what we buy, what we consume and throw away) affect the future of the planet. It just needs a more compelling name: Applied Environmental Ethics? Practical Life Philosophy? Any ideas?