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A review by deeclancy
The Understudy by Holly Brown, B.A. Paris, Sophie Hannah, Claire Mackintosh
4.0
This is actually a book by four different crime writers, though when I ordered it I thought it was by Sophie Hannah alone. (The remaining three authors are B.A. Paris, Clare Mackintosh, and Holly Brown.) It is a skillfully written and executed study of stage parents and stage school environments. The ending suggests to me there may be a sequel, but it's hard to say, really - I certainly finished the book with a sense of incompleteness, as if there were some loose ends to tie up.
The book centers around four mothers whose daughters are friends at the Orla Flynn academy, a performing arts secondary school in London. The depiction of the lengths to which teenage girls will go to outdo one another, in terms of the cruelties they are capable of in a hothouse, competitive environment (without adequate adult intervention, which there isn't in this particular scenario) are believably portrayed. The mothers of the girls range from the outright sociopathic to caring and decent, but even the relatively decent mothers are willing to make fairly significant ethical compromises to get what they want for themselves/their daughters.
I had a constant, niggling sense of having read different versions of this story before, except with neater endings and resolutions. I realized about halfway through the book that this sensation came from late childhood and early teen years, when many novels to which I was drawn seemed to have stage schools or boarding schools containing nasty bullies as their subject matter. These were popular for a time among my age group, though the nasty bullies tended to reliably get their comeuppance.
This book goes a step further in exploring the parenting that produces such bullies, as we know that dangerous teenagers who drive peers to despair rarely emerge from a void. Stage parents have a possibly unfair reputation for applying pressure on their children (when such pressure can be applied by any ambitious parent, and it isn't always in relation to the performing arts). This is also explored to a degree here, though only two of the four mothers could be described as classic stage parents in the popular sense of the term.
Having moved to a different (normal) school myself for senior cycle partially due to some nasty peer group behavior, including abusive and threatening anonymous phone calls that several girls were in on, 'sending to coventry', and the spreading of untruths, I have to say, I had an uncomfortable feeling reading this book, because it is accurate in many respects.
Having said that, I also know (and have long known) that such girls behave this way because they themselves feel profoundly inadequate and perceive their target as a threat, the target being typically somebody who is comfortable with their own identity. The girls who tormented me, for example, were already in abusive, full-blown relationships with significantly older boys at 14/15, or were dealing with pressures at home that I couldn't even begin to imagine having to face. However, it's in the teenage-girl DNA to give too much of their power away to peers (this starts to fade at about 17-18, if maturing occurs as normal). The teenage girls who do not have sociopathic tendencies tend to forgive bullies and re-embrace them as friends in a way no healthy adult would do, and in a way that sometimes their parents definitely wish they would not (or at least, a healthy adult might forgive, without the re-embracing part). This is depicted brilliantly in The Understudy, with Jess having a very serious breakdown due to being tormented one year, and suddenly being back as best friends with her tormentor the next. This, I can report, is really how a teenage girl will behave, until something snaps and she realizes she deserves to thrive.
In that sense, the book is definitely convincing, and it is also fascinating in its ability to explore how inaction and indifference from the adults in authority in relation to addressing serious bullying, whether to protect their own careers/reputations or retain funding, is a profound abuse in itself. Ultimately, it probably boils down to the idea that adults who refuse to face their own traumas full on, and get the adequate help they need, go on to do extreme damage to younger people in their charge, thus ensuring that the trauma gets passed on in a different form to younger generations, who may pass it on in turn.
This is something that happens in families and educational institutions the world over, and we know this because many brave former students have reported the abuses of their school years in the last decade - in the U.K., Ireland, and many other countries.
I didn't find this book a page-turner in the way I did another Sophie Hannah I read recently, Haven't they Grown. But I admire the way the book is so intricately well-executed and the way the four main narrators' voices are captured by the four authors to convincing and skilled effect. It's definitely a really decent book to get your teeth into over a holiday period (as I did, over a few days in the lead up to Easter). As mentioned, however, I had a sense of an unfinished story as I read the last page.
The book centers around four mothers whose daughters are friends at the Orla Flynn academy, a performing arts secondary school in London. The depiction of the lengths to which teenage girls will go to outdo one another, in terms of the cruelties they are capable of in a hothouse, competitive environment (without adequate adult intervention, which there isn't in this particular scenario) are believably portrayed. The mothers of the girls range from the outright sociopathic to caring and decent, but even the relatively decent mothers are willing to make fairly significant ethical compromises to get what they want for themselves/their daughters.
I had a constant, niggling sense of having read different versions of this story before, except with neater endings and resolutions. I realized about halfway through the book that this sensation came from late childhood and early teen years, when many novels to which I was drawn seemed to have stage schools or boarding schools containing nasty bullies as their subject matter. These were popular for a time among my age group, though the nasty bullies tended to reliably get their comeuppance.
This book goes a step further in exploring the parenting that produces such bullies, as we know that dangerous teenagers who drive peers to despair rarely emerge from a void. Stage parents have a possibly unfair reputation for applying pressure on their children (when such pressure can be applied by any ambitious parent, and it isn't always in relation to the performing arts). This is also explored to a degree here, though only two of the four mothers could be described as classic stage parents in the popular sense of the term.
Having moved to a different (normal) school myself for senior cycle partially due to some nasty peer group behavior, including abusive and threatening anonymous phone calls that several girls were in on, 'sending to coventry', and the spreading of untruths, I have to say, I had an uncomfortable feeling reading this book, because it is accurate in many respects.
Having said that, I also know (and have long known) that such girls behave this way because they themselves feel profoundly inadequate and perceive their target as a threat, the target being typically somebody who is comfortable with their own identity. The girls who tormented me, for example, were already in abusive, full-blown relationships with significantly older boys at 14/15, or were dealing with pressures at home that I couldn't even begin to imagine having to face. However, it's in the teenage-girl DNA to give too much of their power away to peers (this starts to fade at about 17-18, if maturing occurs as normal). The teenage girls who do not have sociopathic tendencies tend to forgive bullies and re-embrace them as friends in a way no healthy adult would do, and in a way that sometimes their parents definitely wish they would not (or at least, a healthy adult might forgive, without the re-embracing part). This is depicted brilliantly in The Understudy, with Jess having a very serious breakdown due to being tormented one year, and suddenly being back as best friends with her tormentor the next. This, I can report, is really how a teenage girl will behave, until something snaps and she realizes she deserves to thrive.
In that sense, the book is definitely convincing, and it is also fascinating in its ability to explore how inaction and indifference from the adults in authority in relation to addressing serious bullying, whether to protect their own careers/reputations or retain funding, is a profound abuse in itself. Ultimately, it probably boils down to the idea that adults who refuse to face their own traumas full on, and get the adequate help they need, go on to do extreme damage to younger people in their charge, thus ensuring that the trauma gets passed on in a different form to younger generations, who may pass it on in turn.
This is something that happens in families and educational institutions the world over, and we know this because many brave former students have reported the abuses of their school years in the last decade - in the U.K., Ireland, and many other countries.
I didn't find this book a page-turner in the way I did another Sophie Hannah I read recently, Haven't they Grown. But I admire the way the book is so intricately well-executed and the way the four main narrators' voices are captured by the four authors to convincing and skilled effect. It's definitely a really decent book to get your teeth into over a holiday period (as I did, over a few days in the lead up to Easter). As mentioned, however, I had a sense of an unfinished story as I read the last page.