The kind of book that is compulsively readable. I hate all the “real page turner”/“couldn’t put it down” cliches, but this comes close to that thing of it always just being “oh just one more chapter”. I think it helps that it’s very bitesize chunked in terms of chapters. I read this on Kindle and it’s so easy to keep going when you keep seeing “time left in chapter: 2 minutes” every time you start a new one.
Is readable the same as good? I don’t know. I enjoyed this a lot, but it’s very soapy. “But”? “And”? Not everything needs to be a translated Swedish epic, I suppose.
I was never formally in any gifted and talented programme or anything like that (I don’t even know to what extent they really exist in the UK/did in the mid-90s at any rate). But I remember the experience of my final year of primary school being largely driven by practice 11+ papers, because that’s for what we were all realistically at that school. So some of this feels familiar.
That being said, though, I do more align myself with the parents in The Gifted School. I’ve often thought what I would do if I had kids - I certainly benefited from my education. Would I deprive them of that out of political principle? How lucky and privileged I am that that’s the concern.
I was surprised to find that the most sympathetic character in the end was by no means the one I would have told you it would be at the beginning. Maybe that is good writing!