A review by nkspas
Claudine at School by Colette

4.0

Back in the late 1800s a young French woman named Colette was locked in her room and ordered to write books by her much older husband Willy. He took authorship of her books which became giant bestsellers in France. She eventually broke free of the marriage and continued to write nearly eighty (!?) published works up to 1954 when she died and was given a state funeral and mourned as a national treasure. Claudine at School (or Claudine A L’École) is her very first book and, according to the introduction, it invented the century’s first teenage girl: “rebellious, secretive, erotically reckless and disturbed, determined to be an individual in her own right, but confused about how….” This book is sometimes considered the first ever queer YA novel and is absolutely hypnotic. It’s assumed to be based on Colette’s own boarding school experiences in France in the 1880s and reads like a deeply personal diary. Deeply escapist.