Scan barcode
A review by wendoxford
Friendly Fire by Patrick Gale
3.0
As ever with Patrick Gale, this is an immersive well-written book.
That said, I find it curious that a gay man would write a coming of age book from the perspective of a young teenage girl in a boarding school. It is not that I am against writers imagining things they have not experienced, more that, why would you write about puberty, menstruation, first bras ..... ?
The bar is hugely elevated in this unravelling of the highly strung emotions of adolescence covering so many issues about identity, sexuality, belonging, class, passion, alienation, morality, disgrace all being played out in a homoerotic male school with a few scholarly girls.
Whilst I found it easy to read it really wasn't Gale's best work. I kept thinking of a long ago read novel The Glittering Prizes by Frederick Raphael which dealt with antisemitism and class so much better.
That said, I find it curious that a gay man would write a coming of age book from the perspective of a young teenage girl in a boarding school. It is not that I am against writers imagining things they have not experienced, more that, why would you write about puberty, menstruation, first bras ..... ?
The bar is hugely elevated in this unravelling of the highly strung emotions of adolescence covering so many issues about identity, sexuality, belonging, class, passion, alienation, morality, disgrace all being played out in a homoerotic male school with a few scholarly girls.
Whilst I found it easy to read it really wasn't Gale's best work. I kept thinking of a long ago read novel The Glittering Prizes by Frederick Raphael which dealt with antisemitism and class so much better.