School of Breaking, a review

of sorts

a review of School of Breaking, by independent author Alesya Grigorovitch.

The beginning of the book is quite whimsical and light hearted. Emile’s nostalgia for the small town she grew up in, and the contrast with the big city, first, and the strange school, second, was very well described and immersive, and there were some very beautiful sentences describing this feeling. As the book gets into the workings of the school, with its awful classes and even more awful teachers and colleagues, it becomes more and more hallucinatory. The feeling of being thrown into a world one does not understand, where there is no one to confide in, and where everything seems both pointless and hostile, started to replace the whimsy and the nostalgia became bitter.

At first the book was reminding me somewhat of Chesterton’s Club of Queer Trades, except this time it was classes at the strange school, instead of strange businesses. Yet by the end of the first third, it was making me think more of Kafka’s Castle (and not just because there is a castle), as the absurdity and strangeness starts to become more sinister and oppressive. I began to feel quite sad for Emile’s predicament and hoping for her to escape. The classes (Stealing, Manipulation, Drinking, and others of the sort) may be strange and unheard of, but the general feeling I got was of just about any school, the idea of school itself. I thought it was very well written, and thus disheartening, how the main character fails to really fit in, or know what it’s all for, or make any true friends (she even ends up sort of losing the ones she thought she had). Since I hate both schools and bars (and the secondary setting is a bar), I was always, since the beginning, hoping for Emile to escape, to just turn around and go home. She goes back for a time to her hometown, however, and finds she doesn't really fit in there anymore either - which was realistic. Then she has a foray into the woods, and that's, really, where I thought she should have remained.

I confess the only character I really cared for and about was Emile. I detested everyone else with a passion, especially Godfrey, and was disappointed that we got a flashback into his story, where I had expected to know, not about him, who annoyed me from start to end, but about the school itself. I always wanted to keep reading but I was disappointed by the ending, because what I really wanted to know was how that school came about, and have Emile finally escape, even if it was into the forest to be alone or with ‘the wanderer’.

All in all, it is engaging, well written and worth the read.