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Overview
In a scene that echoes "Rapunzel," Megan looks down from her tower room at a cloistered all-girls boarding school in England and observes the arrival of the new laboratory assistant, Simon Findlay.
As soon as their eyes meet, their love blossoms—and Simon begins to scale the scaffolding into the tower room for clandestine trysts. But when Dorothy, the school's science teacher and Megan's guardian, discovers the young couple's affair, Megan's sheltered world is shattered forever.
In a modern version of the Rapunzel fairy tale, Megan, who lives at a secluded girl's school where her foster mother is headmistress, falls in love for the first time with the young man her foster mother has chosen for herself.
Synopsis
From the author of Troy, the books in the Egerton Hall Trilogy—back with a fresh new look!
Publishers Weekly
Set in the early 1960s in an English girl's school, Geras's novel--the first of a trilogy--is a loose variation of the Rapunzel story. No evil witch holds Megan captive, however; instead, she and her two best friends choose the privacy of a tower room. Her prince is Simon, a young science teacher who climbs a scaffolding to tryst with Megan. Megan's spinster guardian Dorothy, who has herself developed a romantic attachment to the young man, discovers their secret meetings and expels them both from school. The story, told from the London garret where Megan and Simon are living, ends with Megan cutting her waist-length hair and moving back to school. While the new slant on an old fairy tale is engaging, the message, if any, is not clear. Megan's sexual involvement with a teacher, however young and handsome, may alarm some readers (and parents). Even if later installments in the series help flesh out Megan's decisions, readers may find the lack of a convincing resolution makes this an unsatisfying love story. Ages 12-up. (Apr.)