The Truants by Kate Weinberg

The Truants by Kate Weinberg
UK Publication: January 2020
Reviewed by: Book Worm
Rating: ★★★
Find it here: The Truants

This ARC was provided by Bloomsbury Publishing PLC UK (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest revie

Oh to be young and in love…

Synopsis from Goodreads: In this seductive coming-of-age debut, Jess Walker, a young and uninitiated first year student, falls in love with two great story-tellers. One, Alec, a journalist in exile, the other, Lorna, a charismatic literature professor. Starting out under the flat grey skies of an east Anglian university campus and ending up on an idyllic Mediterranean island, The Truants is about a group of clever and eccentric misfits who yearn to break the rules. As Jess’ experience of infatuation and betrayal, disappearance and loss gives way to a breathless search for the truth, she finds herself detective in a twisted crime of the heart. Unsettling, challenging, surprisingly funny and beautifully written, The Truants is a compulsively readable literary debut with a twist – and a dead body to boot.

My Thoughts: This is a solid debut novel and one that has echoes of The Secret History. The opening for me was brilliant it really took me back to my teenage college days, the days when you love your friends with the intensity that only teenagers can, when everything no matter how minor is a matter of life and death and when nothing is so earth shattering as falling out.

Told by Jess in the present day the story covers the first months of intense friendships, of being away from home and discovering who you are and what you want from life before things go wrong and it all falls apart.

For Jess looking back is a sweet kind of melancholy and the reader is swept along with her as she remembers her role in events, why things ended the way they did and finally in the present day reaching out to move forward and leave these events where they belong in the past.

Who would like this? If you liked The Secret History give this a go. If you like Dark Academia give it a go. If you like intense recollections of being a teenager give it a go.

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