Women's Fiction, Teen Fiction - Girls & Young Women, Teen Fiction - School, Family & Friendship - Fiction, Phases of Life - Fiction

Schooling

Name: Schooling
Author: Heather McGowan
ISBN: 9780375714320

by Heather McGowan

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Overview

Heather McGowan’s widely praised first novel introduces a literary artist of consummate skill, and a narrative voice of astonishing sensitivity and sensuousness. Tracking every mercurial shift of her character’s consciousness, the result is dreamy, disquieting, and achingly alive.

Schooling is a portrait of an adolescent girl, thirteen-year-old Catrine Evans, who following her mother’s death is uprooted from her home in America to an English boarding school. There she encounters classmates who sniff glue and engage in arson and instructors who make merciless fun of her accent. She also finds the sympathetic chemistry teacher Mr. Gilbert, who offers Catrine the friendship she so desperately wants–a friendship that gradually takes on sinister and obsessive overtones.

Synopsis

Book Magazine

McGowan's debut novel looks out at the world through the eyes of an intelligent, slightly dazed thirteen-year-old girl. More than your average coming-of-age story, it has the quality of a waking dream. The narrator, Catrine Evans, is an American sent to a British boarding school after her mother's death. The few students there who even acknowledge her existence are usually making sarcastic comments about her accent. Then there's the matter of Gilbert, a mousy teacher who Catrine is fond of, not to mention the recurring nightmares she's having about a fatal accident that she and her old friend in America might have inadvertently caused. Although many of the details are deliberately left out (there's one character who might even be a ghost of Catrine's mind), McGowan gives us an astonishingly clear portrait of a girl about to be derailed on her way to something amazing.
—Chris Barsanti

(Excerpted Review)

About the Author, Heather McGowan

Heather McGowan lives Providence, Rhode Island.

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Editorials

Library Journal

McGowan's first novel tells the story of 13-year-old Catrine Evans, who moves with her father from Maine to his native England where he places her in the boarding school that he attended. While adjusting to losing her mother, living in a foreign country, and attending a new school, Catrine is also attempting to come to terms with her participation in a reckless prank that may have cost someone's life. Filled with guilt and loneliness and yearning for love and attention, she becomes entranced with her chemistry teacher. McGowan, former writing coordinator at the Fine Arts Works Center, Provincetown, MA, combines a stream-of-consciousness, first-person narrative with dramatized representations of events, bits of third-person narrative, and sporadic journal entries. As a result, navigating one's way through the novel is not an easy task; the very nature of the narrative leaves the reader confused about motivations and intentions and about what Catrine is imagining vs. what is really happening. Still, McGowan's narrative techniques are unique and intriguing and call for repeated readings. Recommended for academic literature collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/01.] Rebecca Stuhr, Grinnell Coll. Libs., IA Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A first novel packed to the bursting point with verbal and novelistic skills—and yet the whole misses being sustaining. American Catrine Evans is 14 (or almost) when she comes to the English boarding school Monstead—the same school her Welsh-born father, back in the 1940s, attended. Immediately, the reader is immersed in a shifting, often near—stream-of-consciousness, narrative that doesn't so much provide eventfulness—sniffing glue, trying false eyelashes in a shop, watching cricket, rehearsing a play—as release floods of the atmosphere and ambiance of school, of other students—male and female—and staff, including the suspiciously strait-laced Mr. Betts (English) and the nice Mr. Gilbert (chemistry) who "rescues" Catrine by taking her home for toast and tea when he finds her alone out in the cold—seemingly lost in a state of the hyper-meditativeness that occupies much of her time: for Catrine comes to Monstead trailing clouds of fear and trauma, partly due to her mother's death six months previously, in Maine, and partly to her sickening belief that, with another girl, she may have caused a traffic accident and killed a man. Both traumas, however, albeit woven conscientiously through the brocade-like riches of McGowan's many-worded imaginings, get gradually left behind as the greater theme of Mr. Gilbert's mentor-like friendship for Catrine emerges, includes museum outings, art instruction (Mr. Gilbert also paints), finally even a weekend visit to his childhood home to visit his mother—as all the while question-knives are silently sharpened, being readied to ask what the nature of Mr. Gilbert's (he's 34) interest really is . . . .Guessing can do no harm, as neither can hinting, though it can be said, in spite of a long Molly-Bloomish stream plugged in for cloture, that the end far from lives up to the book. Remarkable in its mature complexity of method and manner, though less so in its substance: a minor book crying to be let out of the trappings of a major one.