#Titanuary 4 ! ‘The Swallows’ by Lisa Lutz

About the book…

A blistering, timely tale of revenge from the bestselling author of ‘The Passenger’

GIRLS WILL BE GIRLS

What do you love?

What do you hate?

What do you want?

It starts with this simple writing prompt from Alex Witt to her students at Stonebridge Academy. When their answers raise disturbing questions of their own, Ms. Witt knows there’s more going on at the school than anyone will admit. She finds the few girls who’ve started to question the school’s `boys will be boys’ attitude and incites a resistance that quickly becomes a movement. As the school’s secrets begin to trickle out, the skirmish turns into an all-out war, with deeply personal – and potentially fatal – consequences for everyone involved

Massive thanks to Titan Books for my gifted review copy of ‘The Swallows’, which was released in September2019.

If reading this novel does not leave you contorted into a paroxysm of outrage then frankly, you might be dead. And I am saying this as a qualified nurse, get your pulse checked, STAT!

Pretty much any book written in a remote, exclusive boarding school with rules of its own, unchallenged for decades until an interloper arrives and creates hell, is always, always compared to the sublime ‘The Secret History’.

Which oft replicated, has never been bettered, in this reader’s humble opinion anyway.

What The Swallows does, so well and almost seemingly without effort, is take that remote location, name it Stonebridge College, and chuck in 2 outsiders. One of which is Ms Alex Witt, there to teach English Literature, and schoolgirl Gemma Russo who has dark secrets aplenty. She has not grown up in a remotely similar environment to her classmates which affords her a perspective that they do not have.

Alex is running from a situation at her last college, she does not say what and wants to keep her complex relationship with her parents far away from her profession. She is side swiped by the principle who has moved her to teaching Creative Writing, one of the first non-consensual acts of the novel, and wants her to teach fencing. A battle and barter ensues, of which, Creative writing wins she agrees to take the class and sets about teaching her small, privileged elite class of seniors more about themselves than she does about writing. Ironically, given what follows, her reluctance to start fencing has more catastrophic results than Creative Writing does.

It a meta-textual twist, the teacher she is replacing is one of the tenured professors who is writing his own novel about a remote and privileged school, weaving in details from the lives of staff and pupils alike as he lacks the capacity to make up his own characters.

Gemma is immediately taken with the bizarrely dressed-by Stonebridge standards-Alex, and from the first assignment where she asks the class to anonymously define themselves, Gemma feels she finally has an ally with which to take down the boys whose wants and needs are prioritside over those of the girls.

For at Stonebridge exists something called The Darkroom, a place run by the ‘editors’, maintained by a boy who is not what he seems. Here, they use code names for girls related to species of birds, and rate, judge, share pictures and videos taken without consent of their conquests. There is annual award, the Dulcinea, given to the girl who has the top scores in giving oral sex. Except they aren’t supposed to know about the score cards. Or the Dulcinea. And the couple who do, only know because they want to win. They know the system is stacked against them and are dubiously willing particpents but even they do not know how far the boys have gone, or which amongst the faculty are aware.

Living as far off campus as she can, in a literal purgatory, Alex takes the moral high road once she has been made aware of the goings on and starts tutoring the girls in revenge. However, events and tradition way lay their best attempts as incidents escalate, attacks change from verbal to physical and an epic war ensues between boys and girls that brings to mind the great tales of classic Greek history.

This inexplicable ‘honour’ is about to bring the whole institution down around the ears of these boys, as incident after incident escalates-the multiple narrators are punctuated by announcements from the tannoy about the damaging showers on ‘Dick House’ (Named for Charles Dickens, ill advisedly) , outbreaks of poison ivy and lice.

The secret saboteur has a price on their head that increases exponentially with each ‘outrage’, as Gemma forms an army of resistance, Alex navigates the  precocious offspring of people steeped in history who cannot see anything wrong with ‘boys being boys’.

The problem is, when boys are left to be boys, it is the girls who are tarred and feathered by association. It is clearly illustrated in the case of Kate Bush who is made an example of with being quite literally exposed to the ridicule of the whole class, sees no other option but to leave.

No one has any idea just how far this can escalate, and escalate it does in spectacular and shattering style.

This is a fantastic and engrossing novel on how people get sewn into their societal roles and find it next to impossible to break out. And those who try, are swiftly beaten back.

From Alex whose father’s success is a sore spot based as it is on support and advice from her mother, Nastya, and who revenges himself with increasingly younger ‘assistants’, to Finn, the teacher writing a novel with no understanding of people, to the pupils who make up the classes, they all intertwine in this mystery of malevolence, entitlement and greed for self-importance which needs destroying.

The responsibility for these odious traditions begins with the adults but ends with the children refusing to put up with it any more.

I read with increasing horror as I realised the title and it’s particular reference point thinking that those boys wouldn’t go so low, but they did, and continued to keep on digging.

Standout characters for me included Coach Keith and his doorstop offerings to Alex as well as ‘Little Sister’ Linny who runs increasingly dangerous errands for her ‘Big Sister’ Gemma as the war of attrition gains pace.

Gripping, startling, original and populated with characters that Finn  or Len Wilde could only dream of creating, Lisa Lutz once again had me marvelling at how she created Stonebridge (a name emblematic of the move from child to adult, or the impenetrable nature of the school?) and then proceeded to throw stones at each window.

Superb and highly recommended!

About the author…

Lisa Lutz is the New York Times bestselling author of the six books in the Spellman series, How to Start a Fire, Heads you Lose (with David Hayward), and the children’s book, How to Negotiate Everything (illustrated by Jaime Temairik). Her latest book, The Passenger, a psychological thriller, will be published March 2016 by Simon and Schuster. Lutz has won the Alex award and has been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel.

Although she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, the University of Leeds in England, and San Francisco State University, she still does not have a bachelor’s degree.

Lisa spent most of the 1990s hopping through a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting the screenplay Plan B, a mob comedy. After the film was made in 2000, she vowed she would never write another screenplay. Lisa lives in the Hudson Valley, NY

Links-https://lisalutz.com/

Twitter @TitanBooks @lisalutz