Sabine

July 24, 2006
Lust and mischief erupt amid a group of languorous 17-year-old mostly English aristocrats at a boarding school in the French provinces circa 1958. Author "A.P." assumes the voice of one of the five youths, Viola, who writes in hindsight: a motherless only child, Viola is sent by her fashionable father to the lax, elderly "Tante Aimée," who runs the derelict chateau academy. Viola & Co. are squirming with boredom when the medical student Sabine arrives as an emergency substitute instructor. An intellectual only slightly older than they who hails from a genteelly impoverished family of the region, Sabine is as irreverent as James Dean, and as dangerously irresistible. Sabine lambastes Viola, who becomes her favorite, for living in a "soap bubble" of privilege, and exhorts her to embrace longing, fury, humiliation, suffering—in short, to live. Viola obliges by falling passionately in love with her instructor—and is shattered when her lovely, ferocious beloved accepts the advances of the most eligible young bachelor of the school's chateau set. When Viola grows bizarrely convinced that Sabine's illness is the result of vampirism, the novel turns pure, over-the-top, one-handed camp. Anonymous A.P marvelously re-creates the hormonal anguish of the fey teenagers.

September 15, 2006
Viola recalls being sent from her native England in the 1950s to a dull French finishing school led by a dotty, deceptive, and definitely unqualified schoolmistress, Aimee. The students housed in the decrepit chateau puff cigarettes, play at doing lessons, and wait for some excitement. Enter Sabine, a medical student from the nearby village, and Viola gets more excitement than she bargained for. The anonymous author of this ardent girl-for-girl romance evokes the mesmerizing quality of a dream at dusk, meshed with an appropriately overheated, breathless, and hormone-driven narrative voice. Aimee's endless efforts to fix up Sabine with Roland, the handsome son of local gentry, drive Viola mad with jealousy, although she is careful to avoid any authentic displays of emotion that might betray her. Yet she refuses to leave Sabine's bedside when the older girl falls ill. Some sort of fever is raging through the school, or is it something far more sinister? A. P. has crafted an irresistible gothic potboiler. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)