ALONE IN THE CLASSROOM (ELIZABETH HAY)

McClelland & Stewart|April 10, 2012|Trade Paperback|ISBN: 978-0-7710-3797-9

Story Description: 

Elizabeth Hay’s highly acclaimed, national bestseller now in a deluxe paperback edition. 

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.  

My Review: 

Hmm….what to say about this book.  I’m not really sure I enjoyed it all that much, I think being nosy more than anything is what kept me reading until the end rather the story itself.  I was more interested in finding out the ending to this Parley Burns character who I absolutely despised.  I just wanted, wished, needed this man to meet a fateful end and kept reading for that reason alone.  I found the story quite mundane and slow going and not all that interesting and don’t understand all the hype I heard about this novel.  This is the second Elizabeth Hay novel I’ve read and had difficulty reading both so I think I’m done with this author.  

Perhaps you will enjoy it and think it to be the greatest the story ever.  All I can say is “to each his own.”