#BookReview-‘The Temple House Vanishing’ by Rachel Donohue

About the book…

Twenty-five years ago, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl and her charismatic teacher disappeared without trace…

In an elite Catholic girls’ boarding-school the pupils live under the repressive, watchful gaze of the nuns. Seeking to break from the cloistered atmosphere two of the students – Louisa and Victoria – quickly become infatuated with their young, bohemian art teacher, and act out passionately as a result. That is, until he and Louisa suddenly disappear.

Years later, a journalist uncovers the troubled past of the school and determines to resolve the mystery of the missing pair. The search for the truth will uncover a tragic, mercurial tale of suppressed desire and long-buried secrets. It will shatter lives and lay a lost soul to rest.

‘The Temple House Vanishing’ is a stunning, intensely atmospheric novel of unrequited longing, dark obsession and uneasy consequences

Published in hardback and ebook edition by Corvus in February 2020, ‘The Temple House Vanishing’ promises to be a literary highlight of the New Year. My grateful thanks to Lovereading for letting me be a Buzz Ambassador for it and for my gifted review copy.

This novel has quiet, creeping sense of unease to it that chills you to the bone-it starts with a death, as a journalist begins to investigate what happened when a schoolgirl and her teacher vanished without trace. Taking alternative perspectives of Louisa and the unnamed journalist, it sets up the background to the Temple House as seen through the eyes of novice boarder, scholarship winner Louisa.
That, too, begins with a death, the viewing of the body of a recently deceased nun is on display and also used as an initiation for the newbies. Louisa passes the viewing without fainting or crying, unlike one of the other girls, and quickly gets the measure of the school hierachy from day 1.

It seems like an endurance course, until her first art lesson where she, and the other girls, have to wind their way to an outbuilding where Mr Lavelle resides. Here, she becomes intwined with the enigmatic Victoria, and a sensual dance begins between the 3 of them whose effects will be felt decades later.

The journalist who takes on the story as Temple House is about to be demolished has a personal connection to the disappearance as Louisa’s family lived opposite her and was used as a cautinary tale not to step outside the lines that the world drew around you-know your place and don’t try to be better than you ought to be.

As the demolition date gets closer and what was hidden is dragged into the light, no one could have forseen the consequences of unveiling the truth about the Temple House Vanishing.

What I loved about this novel was the perspective-from Louisa we had the fresh , new girl view of the school without any preconceptions , built upon the expectations of her parents and old school teachers. There is a crushing moment when she gets the results for the exams which will allow her entrance to the boarding school and her teacher congratulates her-what you hear is the clanging of a cell door shutting rather than a gate opening to new opportunities.

Caught between loveless and divorcing parents, the school represents a chance to be elsewhere and Louisa sets about inventing a new story for herself to impress her new friends, but as soon as she gets to school, she sees that her attendance will be as the ticking down and marking off of days till she can finally be free. Her removal from the house hastens the divorce and there is nothing for her to go back to.

It is not surprising then that she become sinfatuated with Victoria and Mr Lavelle, a man on his first teaching post who has ill advisedly accepted a position at a female only boarding school to teach art-a subject so dangerous for it’s encouragement of free thinking, that the class is not even situated within the main walls of the school.

As the three become entangled in a dance which leads to 2 of them vanishing, never to return, a mystery is established which piques the curiousity of the journalist who wants to focus on stories of crime against women. In her examination of what makes a victim and what creates the circumstance for a crime-can there be said to be a crime if a 16 year old runs away with a 25 year old?-she really unpicks why this has such longevity , what were the pertinent factrs and why people were so willing to believe the worst. It made me think about what the public reaction would have been if the sexes were reversed?

‘TheTemple House Vanishing’ contains the gothic sensibilities of ‘Rebecca’ with the themes of ‘Women In Love’ whilst creating it’s own atmosphere of loss, love and grief . The tempestuous nature of teen fanaticism and devotion in the absence of role models shows how easily it is to transfer affection, lust and love onto another. The ripple effects illustrate that no one ever truly vanishes, as the journalist shows, more than a decade later it is still discussed in reverential tones and beome an urban legend of itself-parents were happy enough to send their children to the hallowed halls of Temple House but were fully unprepared for the results of what the girls experienced there.

A haunting and lyrical debut which takes you inside the mind of a young girl who is looking for something, anything to spark her being into life, I thoroughly enjoyed, and would recommend, ‘The Temple House Vanishing’ to those who enjoy a thrilling, literate mystery which is very difficult to shake off once it has been finished.

About the author..

Rachel Donohue won the overall Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year award, as well as the Emerging Fiction prize, in February 2017.

From Dublin and with a background in communications and PR, Rachel’s short stories have been published in the Irish Times, Irish Independent and on RTE.ie.

Her first novel, published by Corvus, will be released in February 2020.

Twitter @Corvusbooks @AtlanticBooks @LovereadingUK

Links-https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/hennessy-new-irish-writer-of-the-year-2017-signs-major-two-book-deal-1.3737239