The first half of this story centres round two end of term parties: a high-school graduation party at a lake in Vermont and the next year at a May Ball in Oxford – surprisingly with three of the same characters present at both. You’ve read Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night, so you know at least vicariously that a May Ball is about as close to being in a fairy tale as you can come and still be more or less in real life. Unlike in Gaudy Night tho’, in Our Little Secret the May Ball results not in a betrothal but a betrayal. Like the ball, this novel skirts just along the edge separating realistic fiction from dark fantasy. The principal character is Angela Petitjean aka Little John or LJ. Her high-school love is a swimmer known as HP (which kept me thinking of steak sauce and a rather sleazy British prime minister), standing for Hamish Parker tho’ he tries to keep his first name hidden. (Probably not a whole lot of people in Vermont who know it’s derived from the vocative case form of the Gaelic version of James.) LJ’s father supposedly has a friend who could pull the necessary strings to get her a place at Hertford College. I found that most unbelievable (unless he were senior tutor or something) and equally unlikely that LJ resided there but a year, especially after an Australian blonde named Saskia snatched HP off to Sydney. Instead, LJ takes an implausible job in the town library as an archivist. A few years later they’re all back in Vermont, with HP and Saskia married with a little girl named Olive for whom LJ babysits. But as the story opens, Saskia has disappeared and LJ is the prime suspect. She is being interviewed at the police station by Detective Novak, who keeps asking open-ended questions to which he gets even more expansive answers which provides the substance of the book. Even if we’re not already suspecting that LJ may be a burrito shy of the combination platter, under the circumstances anyone would likely become a somewhat unreliable narrator. Thanks to Oxford, there’s also an Englishman in the story named Freddy, who reminded me that Hertford was Evelyn Waugh’s college because Freddy talks like a minor character in Brideshead Revisited. (I have never heard anyone in real life say, ‘I’m feeling peckish’!) Both the moral guilt of the villain and the villain’s fate seemed ambiguous to me, but then I’m very broadminded about victims who need killing and very biased towards the defence in criminal cases. But especially in the earlier sections, LJ shone for me as bright as a new penny, the perfect high-school sweetheart and with HP composing the ideal couple. Like in a fairy tale (as LJ alludes later) a wicked witch enters to part the lovers, tho’ readers may differ as to which character plays which role and whether they change partners. It’s clear from her bio and Q&A that Roz Nay is an international sophisticate and the range of characters and settings pushed my limits of credulity a bit. But then we’ve had so many psychological thrillers about teenagers in small American towns, that it was a pleasure to spend a year at Oxford and have a character who ‘stalked strine’ in an unputdownable fast read.

I’d considered reading Wendy Walker’s All is not Forgotten but the premise seemed just a trifle too gimmicky, but took a chance on Emma in the Night and am delighted I did, reading it almost non-stop in two days. The story is based on one of my very favorite plots. A child or adolescent goes missing and after a lapse of years (here three) reappears, but leaving many mysterious and unanswered questions as to what really happened. Here the story is told from two points of view, Cassie the teenager in 1st person after her return and Abby the FBI forensic psycholgist in 3rd person limited. Cassie has a story about how she and her pregnant sister Emma were held by a strange couple on an island off the Maine coast, and how Emma gave birth but her child was taken away by their captors. Cassie has escaped but is desperate to convince her family and the authorities that they must locate Emma. It would be a total understatement to call Cassie’s family dysfunctional: a family dynamicist could create a chart with dotted lines intersecting all over the place with underperformers. Artistically the book is flawed because it is obvious that Cassie is a very unreliable narrator but though the author gives us access to her consciousness she is clearly withholding a lot from the reader. And as we gradually discover what really is suposed to have happened, it seemed rather too complex to take place in real life. But Cassie is such an attractive narrator and proves to be a wonderfully brave, insightful, perceptive, and resourceful character that it is easy to suspend disbelief. I don’t think I’ve been so in awe of a teen main character since Beth in Megan Abbott’s Dare Me. I foresaw one principal twist but did not quite get the other one though it proved perfect when revealed and made sense of everything but in an unexpected way. So for total engagement, unrelenting suspense, and superb characterization, Emma in the Night was a splendid read.

Every school is its own little world, and one of the most enjoyable aspects of composing a school story is creating your personal version of that world, with its traditions, customs, even a private language. (In such famous schools as Eaton and Winchester they’re extremely elaborate.) So it was a pleasure to pick up on Dana Mele’s practices at Bates Academy, which like the Halloween plunge into the lake and the Dear Valentine presents were very nicely integrated into the plot. Some seemed to me rather unlikely. The Dear Valentine anonymous presents – a surefire divisive popularity contest – seemed like a terrible idea in a school full of teenage girls. I was most attracted by the narrator, Kay, the captain of the soccer team and a seemingly queen bee mean girl, though we discover she is from a modest background, desperately needs to win a scholarship to college, dresses fashionably by borrowing or even stealing other girls’ clothes, and has some really dark secrets that haunt her, which gradually unfold in the story. I would love to be able to create such a character. Superficially she resembles Jessica Knoll’s Ani, but I found Kay much better developed and more sympathetic – not despite but because of her manifold character flaws.

Artistically, I had some problems. All the narration is Kay’s, which means that preserving the suspense requires hiding (though hinting) much of the dark past. For me this kind of narrator seems very artificial; we know she is teasing us. There are also too many minor characters – other schoolgirls who are in the story mostly to be victims, as well as a couple of boys from the town. But two other schoolgirls are fascinating characters: Brie and Nola. Brie is Kay’s BF and mostly the love of her life with whom she’s obsessed, though it seems like their relationship is constantly thrown off track, as Kay is also attracted to a townie boy named Spencer. I found the characters’ sexual fluidity one of the novel’s most enjoyable features, though Kay’s strongest attraction is clearly to Brie. Kay’s other principal confederate is Nola, a girl from an even wealthier family than Brie’s. I loved the episode when Kay goes to visit her extremely dysfunctional family in a mansion on the coast of Maine. But it was confusing to have so much of the story told through dialogue, much of which doesn’t advance the plot very much. The characters lack the sophistication and polish to be amusing (unlike some books set in major English Public Schools where the boys sound like minor characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray). I think the book might have been a third shorter as told entirely from Kay’s POV but in third person. But I can imagine it at the same length, but with chapters from Nola’s and Brie’s angle too. That would be my notion of a five-star.

Though I found People Like Us flawed and the story dragged, I enjoyed it thoroughly. Kay’s contradictory mix of outer hardness and inward extreme vulnerability made her someone you want to love and protect. At times I wanted to scream at her, but I always cared about her. Definitely one of the better school stories I’ve read recently.