Coming of Age

In the summer of her GCSE exams, Amy comes of age in more ways than one. As she sets out to discover the truth about her mother’s death, six years before in a riding accident, which left Amy mute for a few months, she realises she’s no longer her GP father’s ‘darling little girl’ and learns her mother and her parents’ marriage may not have been quite so ideal as she’d always thought.

Coming of Age feels a very middle-class novel: Amy’s father is the GP for a Surrey village; she goes to a private school (and unrealistically carries on attending after her last GCSE exam); her brother Julian went to boarding school and then Cambridge; they are good friends with the local woman vicar. The list is endless, and the setting could mar a very sympathetic and compelling read for some teenagers. However, Amy is a strong and likeable character, portrayed persuasively so that the reader is always on her side, and her emotional discoveries (falling in love for the first time; hating her father’s lack of attention for her as he too falls in love; coming to terms with her parents’ imperfections) will be familiar to other teenagers. Her one episode of teenage ‘normality’ that might also be familiar, out celebrating after her GCSE results, ends in vomit and a hangover.

Amy goes to Italy alone to find out more about her mother, without anyone knowing, and there meets her mother’s lover. Her loneliness and anxiety about travelling alone are very well drawn, but the practicalities of the trip again feel terribly middle-class (plus no mention of mobile phones, which would have ruined the plan in real life). On her return, Amy finds out even more about her parents and her mother’s death – a grim tale of miscarriage, jealousy, adultery and guilt. There are hints early on that her father might be implicated in the death, but the uncertain truth of accidental death and neglect is much more realistic, as is Amy’s refusal to entirely forgive her father or accept his new wife.