Miss Timmins' School for Girls

April 25, 2011
Currimbhoy's fiction debut is an absorbing atmospheric thriller set at a girl's boarding school in Panchgani, India. In 1974, Charu Apte is an impressionable 21-year-old new to teaching. Instead of conforming to the school's strict religious guidelines, she finds herself drawn to a fellow teacher, and renegade, Moira Prince, a larger than life British woman with plenty of secrets and a puzzling relationship with the school's administration. Charu and Moira begin a passionate affair, but one night during monsoon season, in a mountainous outlying area known as "table-land," Moira is murdered. The tragedy divides the town along an "English fault line" and fills the school with rumors of burning jealousy, salacious lesbian affairs, and vendettas. As arrests are made, Charu and some of the schoolgirls work to get to the bottom of what happened. Almost everyone is a suspect, including Charu, in Currimbhoy's gripping tale.

May 15, 2011
Set in India in 1974, Currimbhoys first novel is the coming-of-age story of 21-year-old Charu, a novice teacher at Miss Timmins School for Girls. But the book is much more than thattoo much, perhaps, since there is enough material here for a whole handful of novels. There is a lesbian love story involving Charu and her unconventional colleague Moira Prince; a more traditional romance between Charu and Merch, known locally as the Man of Mystery; there is the story of Charus extended Brahmin family; there is the social tension between lingering traditions of colonial India and the free-spirited, drug-taking 1970s. There is a murder mystery and, underlying it all, an episodic gloss on Shakespeares Macbeth. While many of these plot strands exist in somewhat uneasy juxtaposition, the intimate portrait the novel offers of India at this specific point in its history is compelling, as is the dramatic relationship between Charu and the deeply troubled Moira. Happily, the murder mystery adds a fillip of suspense and some essential briskness to an otherwise slow-paced story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)