Jess’s naiveté, highlighted by her knowing six-year on narration, becomes a little wearing after a while. Here but most of them are fairly predictable. Her to filter those experiences through the lens of hindsight. Jess narrates the actionįrom a six year remove, highlighting her naïveté and innocence, and allowing Rather than the usual teenager to adult this is more of a young adult to experiencedĪdult, buffeted and schooled by the actions of others. Truants is, at its best, a coming of age story. But the real world is messy, and there is plenty ambiguity,Īnd Weinberg deliberately refuses to provide a pat Christie-like explanation It feels like there isĪ mystery here to be solved, although often the mystery element is purely in That happens to Jess is tinged with a Christie like air. Lorna and her students are researching Agatha Christie so everything Little group and, eventually some of the secrets that underlay some of theĪction. The second half of the book deals with the consequences of the implosion of the Lorna in the lives of her favourite students (including Jess and Georgia) brings Secretly infatuated with Alec, and the very direct interference of lecturer Themselves, skipping classes to barrel around the countryside in a hearse thatĪlec drives, drinking and taking drugs. Knit group of four including Georgia’s South African journalist boyfriend AlecĪnd Jess’s own new boyfriend Nick. Jess is befriended by wealthy beauty Georgia and soon finds herself in a tight Lorna Clay, a woman famous for a book called The Truants which looks at writers who broke the rules. She is particularly obsessed with a teacher there called But the shadow of that seminal campus novel still hovers in the background.Įnglish universities to come to a small, concrete campus in Britain’s Norfolk Kate Weinberg’s debut novel The Truants has broader influences than Tartt, including the life and works of Agatha Christie.

There were probably campus-set mysteries that focussed on groups of students before Donna Tartt’s The Secret History which still seems to benchmark for this type of book.

The truants kate weinberg