Reviews for Schooling

The average rating for Schooling based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2008-05-30 00:00:00 Avenier Frank So Heather McGowan was my grad student professor at Brown in a creative writing class that I adored. I think she had a short story of the same character published in an anthology prior to the release of this novel. Prepare yourself. She is a tough writer, and this was a crazy read. The narrator is this young girl who you can't really trust - is it her imagination or reality? She's very stream of conscious, which I love, but again, you really have to get into the narrator's mind, go with the flow, and often backtrack a bit when you get lost. It's a tough read, but well worth the effort. I just saw that she has another book out, Duchess of Nothing, which the reviewers are stating is also a tough read. Man, I adored Heather McGowan in college. Possibly because she actually liked my short stories that had no point. sigh. Duchess of Nothing will go on my wish list of new reads.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-01-16 00:00:00 Stephen Helgren This got a certain amount of criticism for being stylistically too difficult - NY Times reviewer: "Heather McGowan's first novel is, in the most fundamental meaning of the word, unreadable: it cannot be read, which isn't to say that there aren't other ways to experience or even enjoy it", but in fact you can let your eyes travel over all the words and know what is going on at least 80% of the time. On one level, a British boarding school novel that makes one almost tempted to invoke Stalky & Co, the story and the characters are not hard to grasp; the difficulty is in the kaleidoscopically changing point of view, the by-now fairly well-known stream of consciousness narration style that attempts to replicate on the page the ways in which thought and speech do not fall into neat prose. There's something almost cinematic (a la Robert Altman) about the interweaving and overlapping conversational snippets.