Map of Ireland

Publishers Weekly

Edgy and erotic, Grant's second novel (after The Passion of Alice) runs a complex story of urban racial conflict through a YA-feeling filter. The year is 1974, and 16-year-old Ann Ahern has a crush on her French teacher, the Senegalese Mademoiselle Eugenie. It is not the gender of her crush that troubles Ann-she has long known she likes girls-but rather the color of Mademoiselle's skin. The backdrop of Ann's adolescence is the desegregation of south Boston public schools, and the sight of black faces in her school fills her with equal parts resentment and lust; her response to this confusion takes the form of a light pyromania, and as racial strife worsens, it is clear that Ann has wandered into a conflict between the Black Panthers and several racist groups. When a gang of white kids torch Mademoiselle Eugenie's car, Ann embarks on an adventure that awakens her conscience and sexual identity. Grant is most successful in depicting Ann's internal coming-of-age, but the world outside Ann's head is frequently elusive, and her final acting out may crush any sympathy readers feel toward her. (Mar.)

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Library Journal

Grant, whose The Passion of Alicewas long-listed for the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Award, here tells the story of Ann, a white Irish Catholic teen living in South Boston. With integration just beginning in "Southie" schools in 1974, Ann develops a crush on her black French teacher, Mademoiselle Eugenie. She also falls in love with Rochelle, a smart-mouthed black girl and family friend of Mademoiselle Eugenie. Her love for Rochelle and admiration for her teacher lead her to an impossible choice: turn in her brother to the police for burning Eugenie's car or stay quiet and lose Rochelle. The double burden of same-sex and interracial love in a very prejudiced time and place causes great confusion for both Ann and Rochelle, and Ann ultimately erupts in a fiery act of destruction. The book's political climate is well portrayed, with extremists on both sides making life difficult for those trying to get beyond the racial divide. Recommended for medium and larger public libraries.
—Amy Ford

Kirkus Reviews

Grant (The Passion of Alice, 1995) uses the political as a counterpoint to the personal in a novel set amidst the tumult of Boston in 1974. The desegregation of South Boston's public schools, the rise of Black Power and a young woman's exploration of her sexual identity are among the weighty themes explored here. A native of Southie, tough-talking teen Ann Ahern, the book's narrator/protagonist, is schooled in the folkways of her insular Irish-American community. She knows the kids who rioted when black students arrived in Southie's schools, and her mother has joined other Catholic matriarchs saying rosaries in protest of busing. But ever since she was caught with her tongue in the ear of another girl, Ann has been an outsider as much as an insider. At the start of her junior year, the tensions that define her existence coalesce in a single person: Mademoiselle Eugenie, the new French teacher. A Parisian of Senegalese descent, beautiful, exotic and self-possessed, she is everything Ann is not; the teen is at least as attracted to the possibility of escape that Mademoiselle Eugenie represents as to the woman herself. Ann's infatuation will lead her out of her claustrophobic community into both love and danger. Ultimately, Eugenie will compel Ann to pick a side, and it's to the author's credit that she lets her young heroine make choices that are not especially noble and not necessarily appealing. Ann is both keenly aware of the culture war being waged around her and utterly indifferent to the historical import of the events she's witnessing-she is, after all, a teenager. Her solipsism may leave readers thinking less of Ann as a person, but it's an essential element of her engaginglyidiosyncratic voice. A distinctive coming-of-age tale. Agent: Sloan Harris/ICM