All Souls

All Souls
By Christine Schutt (240 pages)
Published by Harcourt
Bookish rating: 4

Set in 1997 at a prestigious private girls' school in Manhattan, the senior class of 40 girls, plus some teachers, cope with a classmate's rare form of cancer, along with their own angst.

Yes, this is yet another prep school drama, but who doesn't love that genre? This is a very carefully crafted novel--the writing is original, pitch-perfect, and just disjointed enough to make exactly the right point in a non-cliched way. One of my favorite lines was: "Lisa Van de Ven said, 'I can't wait to get out of here.' Then she said college as if she were making a wish, and she shut her eyes" (p. 207). I mean, public or private school, who among us didn't imbue that blessed word with such hope and importance her senior year of high school? Hmmm?

We meet a wide cast of characters, each believable and uniquely drawn. The insecurity of girls is presented in a fresh, poignant way, along with their teachers. Ultimately, the novel feels as though it's written from the teacher's point of view, for better or worse. I think it works, though some of the girlishness and spurts of playfulness that make these girls likeable is portrayed in a sort of wry, distanced way---like: oh, those naive girls listing their inside jokes in the yearbook and getting all emotional at the end of the year, so sweetly silly.

Overall, a huge contribution to the prep school drama genre. Recommended.