Miss Timmins’ School For Girls - Review

I requested the ARC for Miss Timmins School for Girls after reading the overview at Net Galley. Here's part of it:

"An intense, irreverent love story and a dark murder mystery, Miss Timmins' School for Girls is also a coming of age novel set at the confluence of three great cultures: the heroine's conservative, middle class Brahmin family, the British Colonial universe of the boarding school, and the rock 'n' roll, drugs, free love philosophy of the 1970s, filtered to this small corner of India...."

I was immediately drawn in by Nayana Currimbhoy's use of language and smooth writing. The 1974 setting in a small mountain town in India is unique and well drawn. Much of the story takes place during the monsoon season, and I could feel the perpetual dampness and visualize the land shrouded in mist and heavy squalls.

The fictional Miss Timmins' School for Girls is in this town--a British missionary boarding school--run much as it has been since the turn of the 20th Century. Well-to-do Indian families send their daughters here to learn English and western ways. Charu Apte goes there to teach, and it is her story that runs through the novel; her story and the secrets and attitudes of the boarding school. Not long after monsoon season begins, one of the English teachers is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Police suspect murder. Charu was friends with the woman.

This is intriguing. This could be riveting, but for me, it was not. The story was too distended with character descriptions of even the most humble of the large cast of characters. Paragraphs and anecdotes, while nicely told, often diluted an emotional scene, and I often had to tab back several pages to recall the main thrust of a scene.

The story is told from three points of view, but each of them is written as first person. There's Merch, in the prologue, then Charu Apte, then one of the students, Nandita, then Apte again. Unfortunately, there was no variance in the tone and style of the first person writing. The Apte sections often were set up as her reminiscing on the events of 1974, yet the character doesn't give much emotional reflection on the occurrences. First person stories also succumb to the need to give information to which the main character isn't witness, so there is always someone telling and passing on information. Several times an incident would be told, and then retold, and then explained again in detail as the main character talked to different people. Letters and news articles seemed to be recited verbatim by the teller, especially in Nandita's section.

Most of the story is from Apte's point of view, and she is and interesting character; just the story of her family could have made a book in itself. Through Charu, the expectations of India's many social strata are shown, good and bad. Continual reference is made to a woman's role, the importance of marriage and how this determines a woman's place in the family. Her father has secrets, her mother becomes ill, her mother's family is at times exasperating and at others humorous. Some of the best scenes deal with Charu's family.

Yet, had I borrowed this book from my Public Library, I doubt I would have finished it. Too many passages went on too long, and I quickly realized many of them were unnecessary to the overall story. What kept me reading was knowing this was an ARC—actually and "Uncorrected e-Proof." I hope a sincere editor has worked to smooth this into a more contained story that will show off Nayana Currimbhoy's obvious talent.

Here is an interesting article that enhances some of the social ethics mentioned in Currimbhoy's book.