Hummingbirds Book

As a former all-girls school student at a New York City prep school, I was probably more engaged by this book and for longer than I would have been if I weren't compelled naturally by the subject matter. It was an interesting exploration of the awkward tension between the often-rare male teachers and the adolescent girls at schools like this but the writer seems to suffer from a poor balance between "showing" and "telling" - too often, he manhandles his characters into forced revelations and moments heavy with meaning that could have been gently inferred rather than tacked on at the end of every single chapter within the final 4-5 sentences like clockwork. Also, the rampant references to fragile masculinity and fearsome femininity were both tiring and trite. While I "liked" the characters (in quotation marks because likable characters doesn't for me gauge the success of a book), I didn't really care what happened to them because they were fairly obvious set pieces to the greater themes the novel was exploring and those themes were so heavy handed that it was hard to ignore the flat though pleasant nature of the characters supporting them.

Also, there are some weird cameos by characters who ultimately don't matter enough to be there yet are. And one or two chapters are told from the point of view of the wife of the main male protagonist but seemingly for no reason, especially since the rest of the chapters are almost entirely told from the point of view of one of the two school girls or the male protagonist. The sole female teacher of note also gets one or two chapters' worth of POV and it was just as stark a jump every time it happened. While the nature of her pathetic-ness and pathos certainly rivals that of her male compatriots, it's handled so much less deftly than theirs is making her more pathetic and less noble, despite the fact that the male characters are far more obviously despicable and the female ones just....pathetic.

So, yeah, mostly pathetic people loftily aiming for ambitious, Joycean epiphanies but the pawprints of the writer are all over the narrative so few surprises here and not enough ease in the writing or narrative to make it a wholly worthwhile read. Promising start but unsatisfying.