Alone in the Classroom
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3.5 • 12 Ratings
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
The highly acclaimed and nationally bestselling novel from Elizabeth Hay.
Hay's runaway bestseller novel crosses generations and cuts to the bone of universal truth about love and our relationship with the past. In 1930, a school principal in Saskatchewan is suspected of abusing a student. Seven years later, on the other side of the country, a girl picking wild cherries meets a violent end. These are only two of the mysteries in the life of the narrator's charismatic aunt, Connie Flood.
As the narrator Anne pieces together her aunt's lifelong attachment to her former student Michael Graves, and her obsession with Parley Burns, the inscrutable principal implicated in the assault of Michael's younger sister, her own story becomes connected with that of the past, and the triangle of principal, teacher, student opens out into other emotional triangles—aunt, niece, lover; mother, daughter, granddaughter—until a sudden, capsizing love changes Anne's life. Alone in the Classroom is Elizabeth Hay's most tense, intricate, and seductive novel yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this ambitious, if overwritten, saga, which stretches from the prairies of Saskatchewan circa 1929 to the upscale precincts of present-day Ottawa, Anne Flood, a writer and sometime teacher, vividly recreates a defining moment from her mother's youth, the murder of 13-year-old Ethel Weir. Anne's iconoclastic, idolized aunt, Connie Flood, covers the crime for the Ottawa Journal. Since Anne herself doesn't even play a significant role until almost two-thirds of the way through, readers will struggle to care about what otherwise might be shocking life decisions. Much of the intervening narrative concerns Connie's transformation from an 18-year-old fledgling teacher in tiny Jewel, Saskatchewan both dazzled and disgusted by "gentleman sadist" Parley Burns, the school's principal into a self-possessed woman of the world. But like the bare-bones production of Tess of the d'Urbervilles that Burns stages at the school, the novel, Canadian author Hay's fourth (after Late Nights on Air), falls well short of achieving Hardyesque tragic resonance.
