Conversion

Colleen Rowley is a high school senior student at an elite Catholic girls’ school in Danvers, Massachusetts. She is a gifted student who believes she has a chance of being appointed the Valedictorian, the departing student chosen to give a farewell address at the graduation ceremony, a huge honour. On top of this competition to be recognised, the girls are striving to win a place at prestigious Ivy League colleges. The competitive aura is potent. Another student, Fabiana, has a slender lead over Colleen in her academic ratings. Colleen knows she must overtake Fabiana if she is to achieve her goal. One day, in the middle of a tutorial, the school’s glamour girl Clara Rutherford has an unexplained seizure. Hers is the first case in a mysterious epidemic. Dozens of girls start to experience the same severe symptoms: hair loss, seizures and inability to walk. The rest of Howe’s book describes the search for the reasons underlying this strange phenomenon and its causes, alongside the reactions of the sufferers and those around them.

Without revealing too much about this compelling narrative, Howe ties the mysterious trials of these contemporary teenagers to famous but alarming events in American history. The author achieves a notable success because she manages so deftly and convincingly to place herself in the shoes of these teenage girls experiencing ordeals with which they are poorly equipped to cope.

As the story advances, it rings bell after bell with any reader who can recall her high-school days. The story depicts ambitious middle class parents who sincerely believe that by exerting pressure on their children to perform at all costs they are actually rendering those children a service, ignoring the penalties that such pressure also demands of the child. Teenage fiction is full of characters whose indifference to material and social advancement is dramatized. Here we have girls at the opposite end of the spectrum of ambition. It is the terror of failure that paralyses them.

It is hard to say whether the author is more to be praised for the technical expertise of her presentation or for her naked courage in daring to tackle this theme. Five stars from this reviewer.