Alone In The Classroom
Elizabeth Hay
Quercus, Aug 1 2014, $24.99
ISBN: 9781623651053
In 1937 Ontario, schoolgirl Ethel Wier picks berries. Not long after she started, someone brutally
murders her; leaving behind her battered body, two pails and berries. The murder is identical to that of a killing
almost a decade earlier in Saskatchewan.
In the present historian Anne Flood reads newspaper articles
written by her aunt Connie the journalist.
In 1929, eighteen year old Connie Flood became a teacher in
Saskatchewan. Her principal Parley Burns
takes a special interest in her as he seems to do with all the young females
(staff and students) in the school. Once
a failed thespian and playwright, Parley loves the theater. Not surprising, the principal directs Hardy’s
classic Tess of the d'Urbervilles starring
thirteen-year-old Susan Graves. Like a
Svengali to Susan’s Trilby (see Trilby by George
du Maurier), he shapes the teen into what Parley believes is a star. Meanwhile Connie recognizes that Susan’s
older brother Michael is not a menacing retard, but instead an
intelligent person who learns for some unknown reason differently than the
norm. As she works and encourages him, a
tragedy forces a mass exit from the province.
In 1937 Ontario, Connie the reporter runs into Parley just after
Ethel’s vicious homicide. She realizes
raging martinet Parley had opportunity in both cases, but lacks substantive evidence
to accuse him.
This enthralling twentieth century murder epic is not an easy read
with switching time periods and an absorbing point of view. Character driven by a deep cast (to include
the narrator), readers will believe we were transported to the Depression Era
Canadian Plains as Elizabeth Hay provides a compelling literary mystery.
Harriet Klausner
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