Bill Kupersmith's Reviews > Cracks

I'd never heard of the author or the book, but I saw a reference to it in a comment on Dare Me and discovered the library at the U. had a copy so took a few hours off from Jojo Moyes to read it. As my rating indicates, I thought it a pretty good but not great school story. Exept for Miss G., the swim coach, the characters were not clearly drawn, and there were too many to follow in such a short book. The victim, Fiamma, never became real enough to care about what happened to her. Miss G. seemed largely made up of bits and pieces of Jean Brodie.

Setting was excellent, a girls' boarding school in South Africa in the days of the white Nationalist govenment. It's difficult to identify even the decade in whih the story takes place. South Africa in those days was trapped in a kind of cultural time warp and some of the references (e.g. Brigitte Bardot) dated from as long ago as the '50s. But I'd guess late '60s or early '70s.

As I understood it, a "crack" is a "crush" or a "pash"; Miss G. such a bad one for the new Italian girl on the swim team that the whole team plunge (okay, it's a swim team--I couldn't resist) into a losing streak (I didn't really believe that) and the girls want her to be nice to Miss G. so they can regain their form. It wasn't clear just how far she was supposed to go. The girls' jealousy (school stories almost always feature jealousy) leads to victimisation and rough-housing that gots very out of hand. If you've read Alex Marwood's The Wicked Girls you know what could have happened to the girls if a nasty prosecutor got on their case.

I can stil remember us discussing Keats' The Eve of St. Agnes in English class at my school so long ago, and how we were to distinguish between "sensuous"--which is okay and something literature was supposed to be--and "sensual"--which was, er, not all right--we were supposed to be Catholics. Still I was surprised that that trying to act out Keats' poem could turn schoolgirls into a bunch of Maenads straight out of Euripides. (Dionysus being present in the form of fermented pineapple juice. Ugh!)

For such a short book, Cracks unfolds very slowly. I'm probably over-rating it by one star, but I was grateful to add it to my school-stores shelf.