Schooling (Wheeler Large Print Book Series) - Hardcover

McGowan, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1587240483 ISBN 13: 9781587240485

Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc, 2001

Synopsis

A daring, deeply affecting exploration of the links between language and imagination, history and memory.

Catrine Evans is a thirteen-year-old American who is sent to an English boarding school after her mother dies of cancer. Thrown into a strange world, Catrine quickly discovers that the fine schooling promised by her Welsh father may be nothing but show.

As she finds herself newly alone among glue-sniffing classmates, childhood memories of apple trees and horses are interwoven with hauntings of a motorcycle accident she saw before she left America.

Schooling is Catrine's story. Fueled by an unstoppable stream of thoughts and feelings, Catrine shows us the world of Monstead School, peopled by teachers and students at once familiar and strange. Her English teacher, Mr. Betts, is remorseful for a life unlived. Aurora Dyer is a fire-haired girl with a shady past and hopeless future. Grim Ms. Maggone, the girls' housemistress, is unsettled by Catrine and regards her with a wary eye. Chemistry teacher Mr. Gilbert is an alluring and complicated presence.

Wholly original in its use of language, theatre, and art to map a girl's life, Schooling is a bold new spin on the traditional coming-of-age story, a literary tour de force.

About this title

Review:

Heather McGowan's Schooling is vivid, anguished and compelling, as she focuses on Catrine's experiences at her father's old English boarding school, where she goes when her American mother dies and her Welsh father returns with her to Britain. McGowan enters not only Catrine's thoughts, but also those of her peers, her teachers and her father. She interleaves within the narrative structure myriad voices through such tropes as a play on words, a play on plays (Hamlet; Aristophanes' The Birds) and an unexpected first-person short story. The impression of a constant shift of perspective deceives the reader into frequently casting Catrine on the sidelines, one player among many, and yet she also acts as narrator, reading and recording the minds of those she encounters. Action and thought intersect closely; everyday speech from her teachers and school friends is recorded alongside her fears and emotions, sometimes within one sentence, so that the subject moves from her to her Chemistry teacher to her friend in America.

Although Schooling is a novel that is rightly fêted for its stream-of-consciousness narrative, it contains many incidents that would aptly fit in any boarding-school story and which make absorbing reading: smoking surreptitiously, bullying, sniffing glue, putting on a school play, punishment for "indecent" photographs, minor arson. These incidents are purely that, though--incidental to the main story. They emerge sometimes startlingly through the thick, heady fug of Catrine's relationship with her Chemistry teacher, which is cast beautifully and poetically as innocent and all-enveloping. The denouement of the tale perhaps should be expected, despite the timeless feel of the novel, but it is orchestrated feelingly. McGowan has written a compulsive account of adolescence that moves and grips the reader while stirring sometimes unwanted memories of being 14 and at school. --Olivia Dickinson

Review:

"Stunningly beautiful, earnest and aching and astonishing and sad.... The most haunting novel of the year.""-Detroit Free Press
"
"Mesmerizing.... Does a dazzling job of conveying the hormonal impatience and doomy romanticism of adolescence.""-The New York Times"
"A thrilling, crystalline novel of adolescent consciousness, a brilliantly unflinching marriage of lyricism and erudition, a book which, like the best books, contains a whole, urgent, and unforgettable world." --Jonathan Lethem, author of "Motherless Brooklyn"

About this edition

• Publisher: Wheeler Pub Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 1587240483
• ISBN 13: 9781587240485
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 428