The Rehearsal
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The sensational first novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries. Set in the aftermath of a sex scandal at an all-girls’ high school, Eleanor Catton’s internationally acclaimed award-winning debut is a provocative and darkly funny novel about the elusiveness of truth, the slipperiness of identity, and the emotional compromises we make to belong.
When news spreads of a high school teacher’s relationship with one of his students, the teenage girls at Abbey Grange are jolted into a new awareness of their own potency and power. Although no one knows the whole truth, the girls have their own ideas about what happened. As they obsessively examine the details of the affair with the curiosity and jealousy native to any adolescent girl, they confide in their saxophone teacher, an enigmatic woman who is only too happy to play both confidante and stage manager to her students. But when the local drama school decides to turn the scandal into a play, the boundaries between fact and fantasy soon break down as dramas both real and imagined begin to unfold.
Sharply observed, brilliantly crafted, and infused with a deliciously subversive wit, The Rehearsal is at once a vibrant portrait of teenage longing and adult regret, and a shrewd exposé of how we are all performers in life, from one of the most bold and exciting voices in contemporary fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Theater, says one of the characters in Catton's shrewd if turgid debut, is a concentrate of life as normal. This idea must be embraced in order to enjoy a novel in which the characters speak and act as if on stage. The girls at the Abbey Grange school are shocked by an affair between a teacher and a student, but Catton aptly observes that they are mostly disappointed by being only peripherally involved in such delicious drama. The girls confide in their saxophone teacher, a puppet-mistress straight out of Notes on a Scandal, who becomes intent on orchestrating a relationship between two of the girls when not delivering monologues on teaching and the psychology of teenage girls. A subplot follows bland first-year drama student Stanley and his increasing involvement with a group of Abbey Grange students focused on staging a play that will also provide a convenient narrative collision point. The novel's real subject is the performance of human life, and in this respect, Catton's choice of adolescent girls and drama students is apt, though the cast is limiting and their revelations repetitive. It's a good piece of writing, but not an especially enjoyable novel.
