This book is about a mysterious person taking revenge on St. Oswald's, a private boys' school, because of their unbalanced mind. It starts with their perspective, switches to the teacher that will eventually suspect them, and then goes back and forth. Let's talk about Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris.
This contains spoilers! My review is not spoiler free. Please read it yourself before reading this review.
St. Oswald's is a private boys' school that our first character is forbidden from going near. One day they cross the grounds, another they sneak in, another they start to blend in and hide there, and eventually they know the school and covertly listen to lessons. Their own school is a bullying nightmare they avoid.
The second character is a teacher, Roy Straitley, who teaches classics and Latin. He himself is a little pessimistic, but he reads people more than others do. He keeps to himself, hates to share his classroom, and is observant. He already reads the new teachers and categorizes them into his own classifications.
These are the two personalities we go between. One (child of the old caretaker of St. Oswald's) is trying to burn St. Oswalds to the ground slowly and destroy it from the inside -a real Monte-Cristo type. The other is a teacher who begins to figure out what is going on.
Overall Review
We start with a section introducing all of the people, background information, and the general setting. It helps to think of this as a chess match between two players. These two players are the person trying to kill the school from the inside out and Roy Straitley, the Latin teacher. I've described them above.
As you go on, a kid named Leon comes into the backstory and you get little snippets about this as the book continues. Straitley's perspective reveals that the kid is dead (and that his death was odd), then moves on. We don't know what happened to Leon at that point, just that our other character had an infatuation with him. That infatuation is not returned and Leon isn't all that nice to "Pinchbeck" (the name our other main perspective takes on).
This whole time one tutor is nudging, causing rumors, using people, causing accidents, and eventually killing a child. Scandals bloom, secrets come out of the woodwork, and chaos reigns as teachers get arrested and dismissed on planted evidence. The kid that gets blamed is eventually dead and no one even knows he's dead. That kid, Knight, trusted the wrong adult. This tutor has not been investigated for most of the book, at least two thirds in. They are smart enough to stay invisible, which is scary. They also got themselves hired in by deception, which is also scary.
Ending Thoughts
The twist ending of this book will not be discussed at length here, and for good reason. They hide the identity of the tutor/child of John Snyde effectively the entire book, until the last five or ten chapters. I can't spoil that surprise for you.
This was a fun, five-star ride. Go read it. You'll want to have Google Translate up on your device for Latin translation. Roy Straitley likes to speak Latin insults and use Latin phrases. There is also French used toward the end.
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Morrow is released! This novella is the story of two women writing a family history for the Morrow family. They find a nasty secret while researching. Will they survive their internship?
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