Chihuly Collection a Must-See

 

Chihuly Collection

Morean Arts Center

720 Central Avenue

St. Petersburg, Florida

 

There’s scarcely a major art museum in the country that doesn’t have at least one piece of glass from Dale Chihuly. If you’ve been to MFA Boston, there’s a soaring installation of green spikes in the restaurant space and foyer that fronts the American wing. It has been variously described as a giant icicle, a bottle brush, or a thin evergreen tree. Those who live in Western Massachusetts can also see a Chihuly’s composition of entangled tendrils in the lobby of the Mt. Holyoke College library.

 

There is a special thrill in seeing a lot of Chihuly’s work in one place. To do that, you have to go places such as Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Seattle, or Florida. I recently took in the Chihuly Collection in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is part of the city’s downtown Morean Arts complex. I was enthralled.

 

Chihuly hails from Washington State and, to his legions of fans, is considered the dean of modern blown glass in the United States. After dropping out of college, he returned and obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and an M.S. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also established a university glass arts program said to be the first in the country. (Some dispute that.) He also has a New England connection in that he obtained a second masters, a MFA, from the Rhode School of Design. Chihuly holds numerous honorary degrees and has been showered with awards and honors around the globe. He even worked for a time on the Venetian island of Murano, where I’ve been lucky enough to visit.  

 

Before delving into the St. Petersburg collection I should note that Chihuly has his detractors. I’m not sure if it’s still true, but for a time he held the distinction for having the largest blown glass piece in the world. For some critics that was emblematic of Chihuly’s penchant for showmanship over artistic merit. It probably doesn’t help that Chihuly exudes a piratical look with a patch over his left eye that is the result of a 1976 auto accident in London that blinded him in that eye. (It was ironically the result of smashed glass.) More to the point, though, it left him unable to use a blowing tube. In other words, he designs his works and consigns it to others.

 

Personally, I’m not a fan of the work at MFA Boston and am put off by the snaky evocations of the one at Mt. Holyoke, but I’m happy to place Chihuly at the forefront of American glass arts. Most museum glass displays bore me with their rows upon rows of cut crystal, decanters, bottles, vases, and showy centerpieces for rich people trying to impress other rich people. Chihuly’s work is more organic, energetic, and vibrant. Much of it exudes life as well as light. The St. Petersburg collection consists largely of selected works from various series he has worked upon.

 

One of these is of baskets, some of which were inspired by the Navajo or Japanese design. Quite a few are simply products of his imagination. These are the first thing you encounter at the Morean. 

 

    

 

I am very fond of his evocation of the sea. Some of the most impactful pieces are seen from below as you gaze upward at ceiling-mounted displays. It’s as if you are underwater amidst a bed of shapes, foliage, and colors.

 

 

Speaking of colors, Chihuly embodies the ethos of Japanese minimalism in a stunning collection of spheres, orbs, and globes resting in a boat-like receptacle like giant marbles. Some spill out and we see how perfectly they are formed and polished. They refract with such exactitude that the eye sees a spectrum of color. 

 

 

 

 

It’s a personal taste to be sure, but my least favorite are his chandeliers, flowers, and hanging lights. Some of these evoke Persian art; others are faintly Art Deco. Not that I turn down any one of them as a gift!  

 

St. Petersburg is loaded with museums, but I recommend you make the Chihuly Collection a must-see if you find yourself there. (For the record, it’s the only place I could imagine living in the entire state!)

 

Rob Weir

 

Wonder Women of Country, Holly Lerski, Crow & Gazelle, Spencer LaJoye, Evan Boyer

 

 

The term supergroup is so overused that the moment I see it, I grow suspicious. In the case of Wonder Women of Country, I yield to whomever first gave that handle to the trio of Kelly Willis, Melissa Carper, and Brennen Leigh. Willis, of course, is the best known of the three having rocketed to fame in the 1990s in the pop/rock-infused genre that is today’s country music. It was sheer genius to join forces with Carper, a standup bass player who is more Hank Williams and Patsy Cline than modern country, and mandolin/guitar/vocal talent Leigh. Put them together and they are a dynamic combination. Among the gems is the cheeky western swing of “Fly Ya to Hawaii” sparked by a hint of yodeling, Willis going retro on “Won’t Be Worried Now” and singing of love gone missing on “Another Broken Heart” to Leigh’s turn-back-the-clock electric lead, and a bass-heavy calypso reworking John Prine’s “I Have Met MyLove Today.” The eponymo
usly named Wonder Women of Country release returns us to the harmony- and tune-forward country music of yore. Wonder Women of Country are my artists of the month.

 

 

Holly Lerski has been a musical nomad. She’s British and learned to play Led Zep licks in her ‘tweens during the 1970s, played rock in the ‘80s, and was inspired by Jeff Buckley in the ‘90s and first decade of the ‘00s. Then she traveled to the United States and was blown away by the West: the prairies, the mountains, the Pacific, the redwoods…. Sweet Decline is her foray into Americana. With titles such as “Chicago,” “Joshua Tree,” “Carmel,” and “Yosemite,” she leaves little doubt about her lasting impressions. “Sweet Decline” also reflects her immersion in the West, right down to the splashes of pedal steel in the mix and lyrics comparing the mountain ridges to the curvy stickle back of her thoughts and down the middle of the sweet decline. Its wistful edge suggests she’s musing of her journey into middle age. “Tall Trees” is elemental in both metaphorical and literal ways as she hints at a fractured relationship that can be healed with love that endures like centuries-old giant pines. But don’t worry; there’s joy on the album. “Oh Cassy Run” is bouncy in the ways older Joni Mitchell songs used to be (though Cassy is a dog). She also has a fine song titled “Nepenthe,” a word that usually means a mythical Greek drug of forgetfulness, but all indications are that Lerski has her memories intact.

 

 

As Above So Below is the debut recording from the duo/life partners Mike McClure and Chrislyn Lawrence who perform as Crow and Gazelle. That unusual moniker owes its origin to the first two tarot cards drawn during an early date. Each spent a lot of their youth in fundamentalist parts of Oklahoma and Texas, but as the title track reveals, they opted out of harsh tenants for a more universalist faith in which the gap between the human and the divine is narrower. “Still Free to Fly” dispels wisdom in how they dumped the libertine view of freedom in favor of one that replaces drifting in the twilight with one that celebrates not needing to wander. If you have any doubt about what they mean, check out the lyric version of “Blackbird." To don my reviewer hat, though, I found McClure and Lawrence more admirable than musically enticing. For my tastes, the album is too safe and of a piece. 

 

 

 

Spencer LaJoye has released Shadow Puppets, an apt title on several levels. LaJoye grew up in an evangelical household, but uses the pronoun they, identifies as non-binary, and is religious but adamantly non-Christian. This Michigan-based singer songwriter is unafraid to play in churches or to assert their experiences. On the title track LaJoye confesses … all I got is a shadow so big, a shadow so wide/it’s a darkness I fit my whole self inside, and later boldly discusses top surgery in an offering directly titled “Surgery.”  LaJoye has been well received by many communities of faith, in part because of songs like “Plowshare Prayer.” It is, in my estimation, the best song on the album. It is deeply spiritual, appeals to a higher power, and challenges believers to live up their creeds. Listen to the link as the close captioning reveals the depth of those sentiments. LaJoye has a powerful message and an even more powerful voice. The arrangements, though, could use much more diversity.

 

 

 

Evan Boyer is about to drop The Devil in Me. In the namesake song he comes off as the anti-Spencer LaJoye: I’m a bad man doing bad things/I’ve walked the line so many times for all the joy it brings/I’ve got a bad way, pray for me like rain/I should have died so many times and all the souls would have been saved. I couldn’t find a clip of this excellent gritty song, but I suspect that this Dallas-based Americana artist who draws comparisons to Jason Isbell and Tom Petty is more bark than bite. “Burn the Ships,” backed by the excellent Texas band Della Rose, is soulful country that’s more a man searching for a landing place than a bad boy anthem. “Cedar Creek” is positively sweet, the hard edges of his big voice notwithstanding. Ditto “Home to You.” Hey Evan, get some more vids out there so more people can hear what I did.

 

Rob Weir

Witchcraft: More Than Just Salem

 

 

 

Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (20230

By Marion Gibson

Scribner, 261 pages + back matter.

★★★★

 

Many people think “Salem” the moment the word “witch” is uttered. There is little doubt that the events in 1692 Massachusetts are a stain upon the pages of American history, Yet they are a mere blip on the far bigger, older, and ongoing global scapegoating record. That’s why Marion Gibson, a professor at the University of Exeter in England, devotes just one of her 13 chapters of Witchcraft to Salem.

 

Scholars have long known that the persecution of witches runs deep in the veins of Western history, hence Gibson begins her study with the 1485 trial of Helena Scheuberin in Austria. It’s not even close to being the oldest witch accusation in the West­–the Old Testament sanctions killing witches­–but it was a watershed in leading to mass witch hysteria. Scheuberin was acquitted, but her case fired the zeal of demonologists and led to the publication of guides on how to identify witches (and male wizards), the most infamous being Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, which held sway for centuries.

 

Untold numbers of women suffered in the post-Scheuberin period. An estimated 35-50,000 were executed between 1450-1750. Gibson recounts the toll in North Berwick, Scotland in the 1580s-90s–one tale of which influenced Shakespeare’s MacBeth–and those in Europe’s “colonial edge” of northern Scotland, Scandinavia, and North America. These tragic details are known to scholars, but there is a lesser-discussed synthesis involved in Gibson’s readable account. She reminds us that witchcraft upheavals through the ages take place for many of the same reasons across time–religious disputes, non-scientific speculation, political manipulation, fear of outsiders (Jews, travellers, the Sami people), the Reformation­, offshoots of warfare–but also that the very definition of witchcraft has been malleable.

 

The Bible indeed mentions witches, but how do we explain the rarity of accusations in Europe prior to the 15^th century? Gibson argues that witchcraft has undergone cycles in which it was superstitious to believe or to not believe in it. In the 1620s, Joan Wright became America’s “first” witch. She was a respected healer, herbalist, and midwife in Virginia, but because she wasn’t always successful in her ministrations and the colony was starving, she came under suspicion. As far as we know, Wright survived but the transformation from healer to witch planted the very idea of Satan loose upon North American soil.

 

Gibson detected “echoes” of witchcraft paranoia after Salem and the rise of Enlightenment thinking–during the French Revolution, homophobia outbreaks, attacks on indigenous beliefs, and during sensational murder trials– but the prevailing norm in the West shifted to associating malevolent witchcraft with archaic superstition. In chapters set in Sub-Saharan Africa Gibson reminds us, though, that the Western norm is not universal. Nor does the Western ideal always have salutary effects. In her final chapter on Stormy Daniels Gibson shows how rejection of the power of witches can be manipulated for political advantage. She speculates that Donald Trump’s charge that his detractors and accusers are engaging in a “witch hunt,” is an attempt to tar them with ideological superstition.

 

This is both an enlightening and entertaining book, though it has its flaws. I appreciated Gibson’s attempts to globalize witchcraft fears, but she is open to the charge of having written a Eurocentric book that’s merely a drive-by peek at the rest of the world. This, in my estimation, is fair commentary. There would have been nothing wrong with confining her study to the West and, having heard her speak, she had plenty of material to have expanded Western examples.

 

Gibson sometimes draws distinctions too sharply. In later chapters she presents modern-day witchcraft as a return to the standards before Joan Wright’s trial; that is, that witches are either benign or engage in healing arts. That depends on who you ask! If she’s right, Trump’s evocation of a witch hunt is a political gamble. There are plenty of evangelicals and cultural conservatives who continue to demonize homosexuals, witches, spiritualist mediums, astrologists, those holding non-Christian beliefs, and (paradoxically) scientists. Some ministers and priests would happily append Malleus Maleficarum to the New Testament.

 

I wish to emphasize that I’m one of the scholars who has delved into the topic at hand and thus my eye is more critical than that of the average reader. You need not wade in academic waters to enjoy Gibson’s short volume. You’ll learn a lot if you do.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Life: Why Books are Better than TV

 

Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery (2013)

Directed by Peter Moss

Magnolia Pictures, 85 minutes, Not Rated

★★

 

Are you disappointed when a book you loved is made into a TV show and what you see doesn’t match what’s in your head? One can’t really fault the script writer or director for that. After all, there’s no reason why anyone else would carry the same impressions as you. Still Life, though suffers from a major fault. The Peter Moss-directed version of Louise Penny’s first Armand Gamache novel sacrifices the very thing that has made her novels­–# 15 is due this fall–so beloved: strong characterization.  

 

The novel Still Life introduced us to Gamache and Three Pines, Québec; Still Life the TV show tries to cram all of the characters into 85 minutes, gets many of them wrong, and jettisons character depth in favor of solving a mystery. It’s bad choice; the mystery isn’t actually all that complex. I’m not sure if this Penny project went any further than the first book but let’s put it this way; if you tried to read Penny’s 293-page novel in 85 pages, you’d have to read 3.5 pages per minute and you’d miss a lot. (I’ve read books that fast written by some academics whose turgid prose would be masochism to read slowly, but novels are a different story!)

 

Here's a thumbnail of the storyline for those who’ve not read the novel. Seventy-eight-year-old Jane Neal, a retired school teacher, walks in the woods and is murdered. Who would kill such a harmless and well-loved individual? This brings Chief Inspector Gamache (Nathaniel Parker), the head of the homicide division in Québec, to the tranquil, close-knit, and hard-to-find village of Three Pines to investigate. He is accompanied by his right-hand man Jean-Guy Beauvoir (Anthony Lemke), efficient Agent Isabelle Lacoste (Judith Baribeau), and pouty, flippant Inspector Yvette Nicol (Susanna Fourrier). The mystery involves a shocked village, a close-to-the-margins family, three ill-behaving teens, a confession, unrequited love, Jane’s not-very-sad niece, art, and the creepy Hadley mansion.

 

We also meet a few of the Three Pines regulars: painter Clara Morrow (Kate Hewlett), Clara’s artist husband Peter (Gabriel Hogan), and aging poet Ruth Bardo (Deborah Grover). If you wonder about Olivier and Gabri, Myrna Landers, Dr. Harris, and Gamache’s wife Reine-Marie, the term cameo applies. That can partly be explained by the need to elide to fit everything into 85 minutes, so I call no fouls on this. I will, though, assess technical fouls for numerous other transgressions, though Moss got Jean-Guy, Peter Morrow, Isabelle Lacoste and Yvette Nicol right, though Baribeau wasn’t on the screen very long.

 

Now for the misfires:

 

·      Kate Hewlett was too beautiful to play the part of Clara Morrow. At the very least they could have splattered her with paint and mussed her hair!

·      A smiling Ruth Bardo? No, no, no! She’s a tart-tongued, whiskey-mooching misanthrope who was often amusing, but seldom in a nice way. It takes numerous books to gain insight into why.

·      Myrna Landers is mere background in the show, but she’s played by the very attractive and shapely Patricia McKenzie. Penny’s Landers is a cornerstone of the village, runs the bookstore, and is kind, but her beauty is mostly internal, as she’s presented as obese. (I gather she’s even thinner in the new show. Shame!)

·      I’ve liked Nathaniel Parker in BBC productions and movies, but he’s miscast as Armand Gamache. He says some of the right things, but he lacks gravitas. Crinkly eyes alone don’t convey much. Mostly he’s a presence in the film around which the mystery unfolds, but we get little sense of his keen mind or commanding presence. Penny fashioned her fictional Gamache from Atticus Finch, her late husband (Michael Whitehead), and a Québec tailor whose surname she borrowed. For other reasons hard to articulate, I simply didn’t buy Parker as Armand.

 

I hasten to remind that my comments apply to the DVD version of a 2013 production. I’m not an Amazon Prime member, so I’ve not yet seen the latest attempt to bring Gamache to the small screen. I can only hope that the Alfred Molina-anchored series is stronger. If I do watch it, though, I think I’ll wait until Ms. Penny is done writing books.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Peace is Compromise Not Conquest

 

Thoughts on Racism and Activism

 

College campuses are aflame with protests over conflict in the Middle East. Key phrase “in the Middle East.” Analogies are made to the anti-Vietnam War protests of my youth. These are specious for several reasons, the most obvious being that this war does not directly involve the United States. No Americans are engaged in fighting in any sort of official capacity.

 

Some would say the United States is directly involved as it sells weaponry to Israel. True enough; it has supported Israel since 1948 and, after three wars were launched by Muslim powers, began sending military aid after 1971. (Four more wars have occurred since then.) I’ve long argued that the United States shouldn’t be sending anyone military aid, but good luck convincing policymakers of that. For the record, the United States has also sent aid to Palestine since 1994–more than $40 billion through 2020. 

 

Another difference is that few anti-Vietnam protestors were under the illusion that the “Establishment,” as we called those holding police and political power, would turn the other cheek. I can’t recall anyone calling themselves “activists” or “revolutionaries” who anticipated anything other than rough treatment for acts of civil disobedience. They were willing to risk arrest, prison, and/or severe campus sanctions.  Message: If you need to feel “safe,” stay away from protests.

 

Protest can also damage your future. Ask Jane Fonda, who has never shaken the “Hanoi Jane” appellation she got from visiting the North Vietnamese frontlines during the Vietnam War. She has apologized many times, but the taint remains. How hard is it today to scour social media to identify “troublemakers?”  

 

Frankly, though, it was the Jane Fondas actively rooting for a U.S. defeat and those who draped themselves with North Vietnamese and Vietcong flags who many in the peace movement saw as obstacles to peace. They gave it a stink of anti-patriotism rather than challenging the nation to live up to stated ideals. Today’s keifa-wearing college protestors leave behind a stench of anti-Semitism , despite the occasional Jewish student standing in solidarity with them. The same is true for perceived anti-Islamophobia circling Israeli-flag wavers confronting pro-Palestinian chanters..

 

And here’s the big kicker: None of this will bring peace to the Middle East. Americans enculturated into a sports mindset view all issues as having a “winner” and a “loser.” There is nothing about the current conflict between Israel and Palestine that fits such reductionist thinking. An A versus B scenario yields either the status quo in harsher terms or the destruction of Israel. What, after all, is implied by an old slogan attributed to David Ben-Gurion (“No Palestinians, no problem.”) or to that of anti-Semitic demonstrators (“From the desert to the sea.”)?

 

Some might argue that divestment will “force” Israel to change. Don’t bet on it. Capital is amoral and Israel is not South Africa under apartheid. The GDP of Israel is $525 billion and it has $27.7 billion worth of annual investment. Palestine’s numbers pale in comparison: $19.1 billion and $3.7 million. If you think pressure will change this, explain why foreign investment in Israel has risen by 29% since its invasion of Gaza.

 

 An enduring peace will require compromise and admission of guilt on both sides. There are no “good guys” who can claim the high moral ground. Here is a short list of “hard” questions that are mere starting points for negotiation:

 

·      Why did Palestine reject statehood in 1947-48?

·      How can a bifurcated Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) survive when other attempts (West/East Pakistan, Cyprus, Azerbaijan/Nakhichevan/Nagorno, Lesotho) struggle?

·      Will Israel abandon West bank settlements?

·      What will be the fate of Jerusalem?

·      Why is Israel the only regional democracy?

·      How will Palestine atone for the murder of I,139 Israeli non-combatants and the taking of 250 hostages?

·      Will Palestine apologize for citizens who cheered 9/11?

·      Will Israel rebuild Gaza?

·      Will Palestine concede Israel’s right to exist? 

·      Will Palestine renounce terror?

·      Will Israel repudiate expansionism?

·      Is there a path to regional citizenship?

 

If any or all of this is resolved, it will take a long time and be hammered out by professional mediators and independent bodies that can sway major powers. It seems almost impossible to believe that Likud or Hamas can play any role whatsoever in the solution. Nor can clashing groups of college kids spurred on by manipulating elders and outside agitators do much more than bring home the war of hate.

 

 

Hither Page Didn't Grab Me

 

 

Hither Page: A Romance  (2019)

By Cat Sebastian

Self-published, 224 pages

★★

 

I don't remember exactly how Hither Page came to me for review. I guess it was sent my way because I read a lot of mysteries and have a fondness for Agatha Christie's English mysteries with eccentric characters.

 

Hither Page has some amusing stuff in it and is diverting, but it also has features that irk me. A lot of people try to write like Agatha Christie but they are too often Christie simulacrum. It’s not as simple as mixing a few oddballs, a quaint English village, a murder or two, and befuddlement before revelation. I don't wish to accuse author Cat Sebastian of being a mere copycat, but I can understand how many readers could draw that conclusion.

 

There's another genre of writing and film-making that makes me impatient. I call it the striptease, a form of expression where it's very obvious early on that two characters are hot for each other and will end up in the sack. It doesn't really matter to me if the characters are straight, gay, animal, mineral, or vegetable, but when you can see it coming from a mile away you just want the characters to get on with it.

 

As Page and Sommers Book One, the novel introduces us to James Somers, a doctor who is squeamish around blood and violence, and Leo Page who does investigation work for an agency headed by Sir Alexander Templeton who is probably blackmailing Leo, who is gay at a time in which such activity is unlawful. As it turns Doctor Sommers has the same proclivities. There's a whole lot of eyeballing, obsessive thoughts, and suppressed urge in this novel, but there was absolutely no doubt that the two are going to become lovers. So get on with it already and cut to the mystery.

 

It takes place in an English village called Wychcomb Saint Mary immediately after World War II. It's a place full of gossips, cranks, loonies, and clueless rich people who could have been drawn from the Monty Python upper class twit of the year sketch. There is Colonel Armstrong and his handsome secretary Edward Norris, a lady killer by which I mean in the cad sense not the sanguinary. There is grumpy Marston, a name plucked from a Eugene O'Neill play, a nervous recluse who had been a POW during the war, drinks too much, and lives alone in a cottage in the woods. Daniel Griffiths is the local vicar and his wife Mary was probably once pretty but is now down-at-the-heels. Add Miss Edith Pickering, who hired a “daily woman” house-cleaner who pokes around where she's not supposed to. Mrs. Hoggett, the cleaning woman in question is our first corpse. She leaves £1000 to 15-year-old Wendy Smythe who befriended her, but where did a cleaning woman get that kind of money?

 

There's a lot of kind of back and forth in this novel. Apparently lots of people in Wychcomb hold grudges, so many that Colonel Armstrong rhetorically asks Page, “[H]ave you ever met a rich man somebody did not wish to kill?” (Ya’ think that might be foreshadowing?) There's a subplot of a missing drug Veronal, a barbital, that fits the theory that Mrs. Hoggett was dosed and pushed down the stairs, and an attempt on Leo's part to pass himself off as an architectural expert who is writing about the local church’s features. He is so obviously not a scholar that villagers see through him quicker than it takes to polish off a biscuit and a cup of tea. How about back stories about who is heir to the colonel's estate, meddling Home Office agents, and relatives who might be non-relatives.

 

Cat Sebastian has a husband and three children but according to her website likes to write “steamy, upbeat historical romances” usually with one or more LGBTQ+ characters. Meh! That's fine, but this is a very messy mystery and an extremely sappy love story. There's a second book but I think I shall duck it. And I know for certain that Agatha Christie remains on her throne.

 

Rob Weir

St. Ambrose School for Girls: Scandal and Murder

 

The St. Ambrose School for Girls

By Jessica Ward

Gallery Books, 356 pages.

★★★

 

There's nothing like a private school for a tale of jealousy, sexual predation, and murder.

 

Jessica Ward spins such a yarn in The Saint Ambrose School for Girls. Ward writes about what she knows and those familiar with western Massachusetts immediately grasp what Ward intends. Saint Ambrose is a Gothic brick campus in the small town of Greensboro Falls on the Massachusetts New Hampshire border. It’s a dead ringer for the old Northfield School for Girls. Ward is a graduate of Northfield Mount Hermon* and did her undergraduate work at nearby Smith College. OK, so St. Ambrose and Greensboro Falls are Northfield.

 

There is much to commend about the educational excellence of private schools, but young people living in what is essentially a rural cloister can be a different matter. After all, the students are aged 14 to 18 and to the degree that they lie rely upon adult role supervision at all, it is their teachers and house parents. Mostly, though, they take their cues from each other. They are prone to cliques, shifting friendships, and the vicissitudes of the maturation process. Quite a few are children of privilege with a propensity to look down their noses at those who aren't.

 

Sarah Taylor is certainly not a rich kid. She is the daughter of single parent Tera who tries too hard to fit in with other parents on drop-off day of fall semester. This mortifies Sarah, who sees her mother as bargain basement amidst a runway of Versace. In her mind, the latter exude faux politeness but can't wait for her mother to shut up. She’s probably right, but, as the saying goes, Sarah has issues. She's a Goth, bipolar, has made suicide attempts, and needs a heavy dose of lithium to stay stable. She's not violent, but she is anxious, excitable, and prone to fantasizing. She also hates sports, a no-no at private academies.

 

Sarah’s world at Saint Ambrose clashes with that of Greta Stanhope and her posse. Greta comes from money, is preened to the max, and is a bully. Ellen “Strots” Strotsberry also comes from serious money, but doesn't seem to care much for Greta and her crowd. Strots is also working on her ‘tude by being a field hockey jock, dressing down, smoking, and cultivating being unconventional,. She's also a closeted lesbian because officially there's no sex on campus and also because it's 1991 and it wasn't always safe to be out, especially in Northfield excuse me, Greensboro Falls. Strots befriends Sarah to annoy Greta, who is also awful to another scholarship girl, Keisha, an African American and a field hockey teammate of Strots.

 

Ward throws in other elements common to melodramas about private schools. There's Nick, a hunky English teacher who drives a vintage Porsche. He’s married but his wife is a much in demand researcher who is seldom on campus. That makes it easier for students to swoon over Nick. So too does a dowdy female math colleague, but the girls vie for his attention. Some feel very proprietary about demanding it. And what would a private academy be without scandals, fights, accusations of cheating, wealthy donors seeking scapegoats to deflect guilt from their little darlings, illicit behaviors, long-buried campus secrets, Mountain Day, a wicked dean, and some good old American violence and tragedy?

 

Ward is an excellent storyteller but as you can tell from my snarkiness, I wouldn't call The Saint Ambrose School for Girls a prose tour de force. Ward, who also writes paranormal romance novels under the name J. R. Ward, knows her audiences. Her novel is filled with ambience that keeps you reading to find out who did what to whom and why. You won't find many departures from the template of others in the sullied underbelly of private schools genre. That said, if you're looking for a diverting beach or airplane read this will do the trick.

 

Rob Weir

 

* For those unfamiliar with the Connecticut Valley, there used to be two schools on opposite sides of the Connecticut River, Northfield School for Girls located in the town and Mount Hermon School for Boys in a wooded area of Gill, Massachusetts. After the 2004-05 session, the Northfield campus was closed, and enrollment reduced. Both male and female students now attend the Mount Hermon campus. (The old Northfield campus has been sold.)