Wilberforce

July 27, 2015
In her debut, Cross spins the scruffy narrative of Morgan Wilberforce, a 17-year-old student—and troublemaker—at St. Stephen’s Academy, a small British private school, in 1926. When he’s not sneaking away to the local pub, Wilberforce is injuring himself on the rugby pitch, battling fellow students, and pining for the affection of both male and female peers. Amid the growing chaos, Wilberforce begins a romantic tryst with fellow student Charles Spaulding, yet when one of Spaulding’s other lovers learns of the relationship, a student ends up dead in a tragic accident, leaving Wilberforce as a shell of his former self. Now hallucinating good and evil versions of himself, the young man slowly marches down a destructive path of sexual escapades and violence. John Grieves, a history teacher at the academy, attempts to help Wilberforce through his perpetual plights, yet the school has more than one firebrand to oversee: a group of disgruntled third-year students are fed up and begin setting fires and gumming up campus locks. Though Cross succeeds in creating a multilayered drama, one of the major perspectives of the book abruptly vanishes, leaving the reader to wonder why it was included in the first place. In addition, the boys of the academy frequently act with a naïveté that feels far younger than their years. Still, readers will find enough angst and drama to carry them through this story of sentimental education.

July 15, 2015
This debut moves from the misadventures of several boys at a British public school in 1926 to a study of a particularly hapless young man and his possible redemption. St. Stephen's Academy, a so-so non-Eton, is muddling along when one malevolent lad arranges a subversive prank that sparks a disciplinary backlash. Within the communal crime and punishment, Cross zooms in on the trials of Morgan Wilberforce, a 17-year-old dealing with hormones, underage females, abusive seniors, constant caning, and a few well-meaning teachers. One of the latter is John Grieves, on whom Cross expends a good deal of ink only to fade him out in the book's second half. Morgan gets tangled in an all-boy triangle that ends tragically (though not before Cross oozes a good deal of purple prose), yet he bounces back in the annual cricket match between students and Old Boys. Finally, one offense too many gets him exiled to the home of an intriguing bishop who combines prayer, poetry, and talking cure in ministrations with an unclear outcome thanks to the novel's slyly ambiguous ending. The cleric is the father of the academy's new headmaster and tied to a painful time in Grieves' youth, but these connections aren't developed. Indeed, the book has several significant and promising loose ends that support the publisher's bruiting about of Cross' Rowling-esque ambitions for more volumes on St. Stephen's & Co., perhaps achieving "the Hogwarts of adult literary fiction." Maybe: certainly the dollops of frank sexual action will keep this installment off the teen shelves, and the absence of a single substantial female character might have more than halved the younger audience anyway. Cross has made a solid start for continued exploration of this strange yet for many readers familiar world, one that might well capture a libidinous P.G. Wodehouse crowd, if she can render her quirky setting, cast, and concerns less earnest and more amusing.

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July 1, 2015

Set at St. Stephen's Academy in 1926 England, this ambitious and accomplished debut is part historical, part bildungsroman, part psychological study, and part English boarding-school novel. With her protagonist, Morgan Wilberforce, a young man who recently lost his beloved mother and feels wholly out of place at St. Stephen's, Cross effectively captures the debilitating confusion and angst that can attend the difficult passage to adulthood. As a first-year student, Wilberforce must submit to a variety of hazing rituals and sexual torments, which compound his confusion and sense of alienation. High jinks and pranks are committed at the school, of course, but there are also more serious and dangerous unsanctioned activities as well. Cross is most interested in Wilberforce's psychological and emotional development, however, and skillfully renders the fluid sense of identity and spirit of experimentation that characterizes young adulthood; readers feel viscerally the protagonist's panic and confusion as he attempts to engage an adult world he doesn't understand fully. VERDICT This convincingly handled work is recommended for all fans of coming-of-age novels.--Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 1, 2015
Morgan Wilberforce embodies all that is objectionable in the British public-school system in the early twentieth century. The Great War has just ended, Morgan's mother is dead, his father has turned milquetoast, and his chums are as callous and crass as ever. Despite Morgan's basic decency, an increasing propensity for rule breaking, an obsession with sex, and a troubling recklessness gradually force Wilberforce to recognize his own personality crisis. This lengthy, contemplative, coming-of-age journey leisurely wends along until about two-thirds through the book, when we meet the Bishopan incredibly perceptive, kind, and godly manwho helps Wilberforce onto the path toward social and spiritual redemption, heightening the pace of the story in the process. First in a planned series set in a Yorkshire boys' academy, this literary, character-driven debut novel requires careful reading but rewards with its psychological insight and dry humor, leaving the reader longing for all that is good, peaceful, and hopeful. For Anglophiles, seekers, and those who enjoy the insular world of C. P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers novels and the haunting power of Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)