Academy Girls by Nora Carroll
My rating: 3/5 cats
you know how sometimes you have a mouth-hunger for something, but it’s not quite a tummy-hunger and you don’t want to ruin your appetite so you just grab a handful of almonds or use your finger to scoop up the “extra” frosting from the cake that’s just sitting there?
this book is for when you have a taste for a The Secret History kind of story but only a halloween candy funsize appetite. it’s a campus mystery without all that heady academia or psychological density; an entertainment that you can stuff in your face on your way out the door without it sticking to your ribs too much.
it’s a comfortably lightweight boarding school mystery/lifetime movie scenario in the vein of carol goodman in which a woman whose life has fallen apart around her returns to her high school alma mater as a teacher and finds herself in the midst of mysterious happenings that seem to be linked to similarly mysterious happenings from her past and where investigating the one leads to investigating the other and all the secrets are revealed at the end.
and it’s one of those books i am finding impossible to review because i neither loved nor hated it. there were parts of the story i found surprising and original but also parts that were melodramatic and inconsistent, leaving me with post-reading feelings neither positive nor negative; just neutrally “this is a book i have read.”
the biggest problem i had with it (besides the fact that the formatting for NOOK was awful, and i had to do my own amateur sleuthing to insert every occurrence of an “f,” “ff,” “fl,” every number, every “th” that started a paragraph (but only then) and to completely reorganize the lines every time there was an italicized quotation, which was frequently, so this:
)
was how staged it was. it’s a really common practice in middleweight entertainment to treat the characters like dolls in the author’s dollhouse, brought out to progress the narrative in dramatically effective ways with little regard for natural behavior. so, chapters end abruptly just when characters experience or reveal something important and then, as though time stopped for them just as the scene stopped for the reader, the characters seemingly wait politely for the correct dramatic moment before resuming their conversation or experiencing the aftereffects of the revelation at a later time in another venue. and this is such common device it’s not something that bothers me, per se, yet it’s something i always notice. but this time, since i was already in clinical-detached mode because of my struggle with the formatting, and because the story and characters weren’t gripping enough to hold my attention, this was a little more distracting than it ordinarily is for me.
i have it on my “books claiming to be just like secret history” shelf, even though this makes no such claims and only shares with my beloved the boarding school setting, mysterious deaths, financially insulated teenagers, and enigmatic teachers; although there is a likely nod to s.h. in the question, What was she going to do with our secret history?
there are many bits and pieces that didn’t quite work for me – we are told certain characters are wicked smart, but don’t really manifest this trait on-page, the friends that are soso close barely communicate, the whole female-teacher-jealous-of-younger-female-students thing is kind of grating, and i’m not convinced the book adheres to the genre’s rules about fair play.
but again – as a snack, it’s a good one – there are plenty of twists and turns, it’s fast-paced and there are multiple threads in play at all times, which makes for a broader reading experience than many others of its kind. it’s a fine entertainment if you suspend your disbelief and just have a good time reading. as a fan of boarding school mysteries who has been exposed to both the singing highs and the groaning lows of the genre, this one sits firmly in the middle, and a good remedy for when you are feeling fingerful of frosting-y.
