This was a very weird, very strange, book – but I kind of loved it for that!

It’s set in an English boarding school for girls, at an undisclosed time in the late twentieth/early twenty-first century. No one has a name (the closest being “Mrs S”), and there is no specific place setting. Sometimes this can make a story feel unmoored. In this case, it does sometimes feel detached, but I think it works. It helps to capture that headiness of the relationship, and the fish-out-of-water feeling the main character has throughout the whole book.

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I really liked how the author explored gender and sexual identity in this book. Sometimes it was done subtly, with a little throwaway moment here and there. Sometimes it was so obvious it bowled you over, but when it came out of nowhere it had a big emotional impact. Especially towards the climax of the story, I really got to appreciate the complexity of the characters and how they related to their own gender and sexuality.

I listened to the audiobook which I really enjoyed. It was excellently narrated by Nicolette Chin, who made all the characters so real and vivid. It was such good narration that it’s hard to distinguish how much is the writing, and how much is her acting. It also meant I avoided one of my biggest bug bears – missing speech marks! I suspect that, had I read the book and not listened to the audiobook, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it quite so much.

I received a free copy for an honest review.