Schooling - Hardcover

McGowan, Heather

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385501382 ISBN 13: 9780385501385

Publisher: Doubleday, 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

From the Inside Flap

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.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Schooling:

"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: Doubleday
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0385501382
• ISBN 13: 9780385501385
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320