One of Anita Shreve’s pseudo thriller-ish books. When I first read Shreve I liked stories like The Pilot’s Wife with a mystery background to them more than the perhaps more literary or historical ones. I changed my mind somewhere and didn’t like this as much as I might have done a few years ago.

This is a series of accounts of events surrounding a sex scandal at a private school in New England. I found it difficult to get my head round what happened being such a huge scandal - partly because the blame in the story was obviously not with the characters it was being given to but some of it felt like a geographic divide - I’m not sure the scenario in the book would have been a big deal in the UK. I might be missing the point there. If you go along with the story it works and I like the device of telling the story through disjoint accounts, the sum of the parts being greater than the whole… kind of thing.

All in all a good read but not a fabulous one.