Miss Timmins' School for Girls

It's a bit unusual for a coming-of-age story set at a boarding school to be about one of the teachers.

The mystery was good - too slow, but good. The coming of age story, not so much. Almost as if she really should have written it as two separate books. I found it hard to care what happened to Charu and much preferred Nandita as a character. The “two stories in one” also made it difficult for Ms. Currimbhoy to give either story its proper due, and the mystery lacks for it. She spent so much time on the class differences in Charu's coming-of-age story that she failed to properly write the generation gap that drove the denuement of the mystery. As a result, understanding the ending is overly subtle - there, but only for those readers who can fill in what is not said regarding the generations.

There's an atmosphere to this story that feels like the air just before the monsoon hits - heavy, damp, and oppressive. It put me off, and it was a struggle to read the first half of the book. I had virtually no investment in the mystery of what happened to Moira - I had assumed from the start that she had jumped - until the revelation about Miss Nelson appeared.