Betrayal, obsession and the rituals of seduction are familiar territory for British writer Briscoe, who mined all three successfully in Sleep with Me. Here, she ups the ante considerably by making one of the seducers a 17-year-old girl, Cecilia, whose object of obsession is her married teacher, James Dahl.
This takes place in a progressive school, Haye House in Dartmoor, where children are allowed to make their own choices--and mistakes. Cecilia's parents, hardworking Dora and feckless Patrick, who putters about making pots but no money, have moved there to live the countryside idyll. They end up taking in hippie boarders to make ends meet and Dora, frazzled and unhappy, makes her own unfortunate alliance with the last person she ever expected to care for: the cool and elegant Elisabeth Dahl, wife of James. Dora has no prior record of lesbian attachment but tumbles into a physical relationship with Elisabeth, with whom she is besotted.
There are predicable consequences to Cecilia's actions, which haunt her through the years. Twenty years later, Cecelia, now in her 40s and a children's writer, returns to Devon with her partner, Ari, and their three daughters, ostensibly to care for Dora, now ill with cancer. Cecilia gives in to her need to find answers about the past, to the point where she almost loses one of her children through neglect and inattention. She also reconnects with James Dahl, still teaching in the area, and the stability of her present life is threatened.
The resolutions of these highly charged affairs take a good deal of hand-wringing angst to accomplish, and while the answers may not be entirely satisfactory, they are altogether believable. --Valerie Ryan, Cannon Beach Book Company, Ore.