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knkoch's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
slow-paced
4.25
It's been a little while now since I finished this, but it keeps cropping up in my conversations. I had no idea before reading an article about this book's release that Charles Spencer was a historian; I merely recognized him as Princess Diana's brother. I was impressed by his writing style and they way he handled this sensitive, emotional material. He blended his own experience deftly with a considerable amount of research and a great breadth of interviews he conducted with peers and alumni from Maidwell school. This never felt like it was solely Spencer's story, but rather a consolidation of voices of several generations of men still suffering in various ways from the harm inflicted on them decades ago as children. (He decides early on to focus only on all-male boarding schools, which seems fair as far as scope seeing as that was his direct experience.)
Spencer really picked at a delicate paradox here, both acknowledging he and his peers' considerable class privilege and marveling at the entrenched English tradition of severe boarding school education, perhaps meant to "harden" those privileged children. The very families that could afford to educate their children any way they wished often chose to send them into the hands of 'educators' and staff they knew virtually nothing about, a situation primed for appalling abuse and subsequent cover-ups. Spencer tells his own story quite honestly, providing an account of his childhood understanding of events leavened with his now-adult perspective, which took many years and considerable therapy to reach. He's quite vulnerable throughout this account, without ever seeming self-pitying or arrogant. Though he does eviscerate the adults who failed him and his peers: staff, both teachers and administration, both abusers and knowing bystanders, all of whom could have tried to intervene. That seemed quite fair on his part.
Spencer really picked at a delicate paradox here, both acknowledging he and his peers' considerable class privilege and marveling at the entrenched English tradition of severe boarding school education, perhaps meant to "harden" those privileged children. The very families that could afford to educate their children any way they wished often chose to send them into the hands of 'educators' and staff they knew virtually nothing about, a situation primed for appalling abuse and subsequent cover-ups. Spencer tells his own story quite honestly, providing an account of his childhood understanding of events leavened with his now-adult perspective, which took many years and considerable therapy to reach. He's quite vulnerable throughout this account, without ever seeming self-pitying or arrogant. Though he does eviscerate the adults who failed him and his peers: staff, both teachers and administration, both abusers and knowing bystanders, all of whom could have tried to intervene. That seemed quite fair on his part.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Adult/minor relationship, Pedophilia, Emotional abuse, and Child abuse
Moderate: Bullying
anna_0319's review against another edition
Shouldn’t have gone for audiobook. I need to go over details and I just lose information this way.
tobysutton_long's review
dark
emotional
informative
sad
medium-paced
3.0
Whilst unfortunately many of the things Spencer shares in this book are particularly shocking (abuse going on and being covered up in boarding schools, quelle surprise), this was still quite a horrifying read. I deeply hope that the many victims of Maidwell and other similar institutions are able to use this to reach as close a form of closure as they can.