w_r_c 's review for:

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

5.0

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I had seen the movie, but had never read the novel. Reading it this weekend, I kept thinking that Spark's style is completely resistant to the spoiler alert. You meet a character when she's a 10-year-old student of Miss Brodie's, you're told that she'll be famous for being stupid as a teenager and then there's a paragraph about how she'll die in a fire at a young age. And worse than that, almost every time she comes up again, we'll hear about how stupid she was and how she, some years later, ran hither and thither in a burning hotel. The point of view is in the Spark making fun of the poor girl, or is she making fun of the other girls, who thought of her that way? Is this just another way of Spark condemning Miss Brodie? Is it her way of condemning herself, or her readers? It's amazing, brilliant and shockingly tough-minded.