Unfinished Desires

I've never read anything by Gail Godwin before, but I picked up Unfinished Desires because I love books set at schools. The closed environment, cliques (and other adolescent behavior), and bad teachers all make for good drama.

The book had a less dramatic plot than I expected, and the events were all pretty low key. All throughout Unfinished Desires, characters kept referring vaguely to the freshman play by the class of 1951: the class, as headmistress Mother Ravenel puts it, was "toxic," and they did something almost unspeakable that year. Their actions and the result, she admits, were partially her fault, but the events and behaviors leading up to it are so complicated and subtle that we doubt that anyone's at fault. That's the problem at the heart of the book: everyone's forgiven, and no one is in the wrong, but none of the characters can stop confessing and obsessing.