Customer Reviews

Wicked!

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
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Once again Jilly Cooper has got a blockbuster on her hands, her novels are delightfully fun full of bad behaviour but with a heart. Her new novel now has an added class conflict. She actually depicts the contrasts between private and state schools pretty well.

This book is so hard to put down, it flows so well & once started you'll be desperate to know how it ends, if only she wrote faster!!

This book is as unreal as its central character, Janna Curtis, who has been appointed headmistress to turn round Larkminster Comprehensive, a coeducational sink school in the Cotswolds. She is young, attractive-looking, left-wing, immature, combative, generally lacking in self-control - but genuinely caring for the students. The descriptions of the dreadful way the kids behave, of resentful and inadequate members of the staff and of a sabotaging governing body (dominated by representatives of a property development company to which central government has transferred the management of the school from the local education authority and which is determined to close the school so that they it can redevelop its grounds) are all rather predictable. Equally predictably, Janna sees potential for real achievements in the worst troublemakers, named the Wolf Pack, and in an incredibly short time wins them over. Not that any of them become as good as gold as a result: the boys especially can still flare up into acts of violence and destructiveness when insulted or when things do not go their way.

Nearby is Bagley Hall, a posh independent boarding school, also coeducational, with a dishy and lascivious headmaster, the suave Hengist Brett-Taylor. (Some of the names Jilly Cooper has invented are themselves quite amusing). Of course Janna falls for the class enemy. Both of them are so much over the top as not to be credible as heads. He seduces her, of course. But it is not only her charm that makes him offer some of his school's facilities to Larkminster: he thinks the government may soon require such offers to a maintained schools in the neighbourhood if independent schools are to keep their charitable status. (There are many references in the book to educational structures and exams in England that will be unfamiliar to most American readers.)

So what do you expect when the Larks pupils mix with the Bagleys? Some class antagonism, of course; but this book is by Jilly Cooper, so in no time at all some of the posh nymphet Bagley gels are snogging with Larks boys, and some Bagley boys are smitten with Larks girls. Great opportunities are given to youngsters from both schools by a joint production of the aptly chosen Romeo and Juliet. For me, the fifty pages, about a third of the way through the book, which are devoted to this episode are the highlight of the novel. Up till then, the book has been quite entertaining. After that I found it less consistently so. The next set piece, for instance, when staff and students of the two schools are on a Geography outing, is mainly an orgy of sex all round, some of it very nasty. Throughout, Jilly Cooper vigorously shakes the kaleidoscope of who (of pupils and staff) is obsessed by whom, with a lot of heart-break all round. The second third of the book sags rather; but in the last third there are again some excellent set pieces. In the last few chapters the right lovers of various ages are brought together - but I can't understand what induced the author to include a truly disgusting scene of perversion near the end .

There are a great many characters in this 1,000 page doorstop of a book, and at the beginning we are given a list of them which runs to twelve pages. That is of course helpful, but I had to refer to the list many times. It would have been better if the cast as well as the length of the book had been considerably reduced. Some of it is funny, though at times the humour is that of slapstick farce; her real villains are thoroughly villainous; her heart is with the underprivileged, and she writes more touchingly about the Larkminster than about the Bagley kids, and in particular about one of the vulnerable boys who has no parents and is longing to be part of a family. Likewise her love of animals and of nature comes through strongly.

Four years' work has gone into this book, and at the end of it there are ten pages of lavish acknowledgments, mostly to educationists who have helped her. She has a lot of the technical details right, but admits that her plot took priority. I should think some of the people she consulted may have found some aspects of her plot-line very distasteful.

I love jilly cooper, I live in the US and it is hard to find her work. The usual beloved characters that I have followed since my teens. They have aged with me but keep their characters. Lots of twists and gossip. A great read with old friends.

I am a Jilly Cooper fan but was disappointed in this book. I read the comments on the Uk site and agreed with them. The premise of this novel is too simplistic to be drawn out with such lengthy prose. The characters, so many, but this time, just plain over kill. At times i found my self lost. Her main protagonist came across as weak and silly instead of the strong but flawed that we are accustomed to. If it werent for her writing style i would have given up.

I am still a fan and will read other material but suggest to readers who are not familiar with her work to read earlier novels.