Notes on a Scandal is another book that was damaged by my having seen the movie first. this is an intriguing book, full of twisted ideas of love. but the narrator's obvious despair and loneliness overshadows much of the story and whole sections felt unneccesary. where the book wobbled, the film excelled. this is worth reading, it's just not really a page turner. ( )

Good in the beginning: about a love affair between a teacher (female) and her male 15 year old student, as observed by an older, slowly revealed as a lesbian, teacher. It would have been better with more suspense about the reliability of the observer - and this could have ameliorated the rather flat ending. ( )

Notes on a Scandal is an immensely readable novel—Heller has a way with irony that's almost vicious, and very peculiarly British, as well as impressive skill at using an unreliable narrator. Barbara, a lonely older woman—the kind of woman who wants a friend so desperately that she drives people away, who is capable of true venom if she feels threatened—observes the affair which her 'friend' Sheba embarks on with a fifteen-year-old student. Things progress much as you might expect, and while that produces a slight lack of tension in the climax, Barbara's narrative voice makes this a delicious, if discomfiting, read. ( )

I wasn't certain I was going to like this book when I began it. It starts out in the present tense, a conceit that I generally dislike. However, it soon changes, as the author alternates tenses to differentiate between the narration of past and present events. And then it works.

The story is of a forty-ish school teacher who has an affair with one of her students, and is told by a sixty-ish school teacher who has befriended her. As the book starts, the affair has already been discovered and Sheba is out on bail pending trial, living in her brother's home with her friend Barbara. Barbara is writing a journal about the events and her relationship with Sheba, and that is how the story unfolds.

All of Heller's characters are realistic, from the inarticulate 15-year-old with a crush on his teacher, to the teacher herself, new at the job, anxious to do good and make good, to her rebellious teen-aged daughter, to the pompous headmaster and the spinster friend. It is the character of Barbara, however, who is most interesting, despite the rather stereotypical "repressed lesbian spinster with cat" image. She is very clever, dead on with her analysis of other people and their actions, yet totally oblivious to her own inappropriate behavior and full of self-justification. She is at once sympathetic, and not sympathetic, a very neat stunt to pull off!

The same is true of Sheba. The knee-jerk reaction is to think, well, she should have known better than to have it off with a student. But the situation is far more complicated than that. As Barbara muses, "The sorts of young people who become involved in this kind of imbroglio are usually pretty wily about sexual matters. I don't mean just that they're sexually experienced -- although that is often the case. I mean that they possess some instinct, some natural talent, for sexual power play. For various reasons, our society has chosen to classify people under the age of sixteen as children. In most of the rest of the world, boys and girls are understood to become adults somewhere around the age of twelve. . .We may have very good reasons for choosing to prolong the privileges and protections of childhood. But at least let us acknowledge what we are up against when attempting to enforce that extension. Connolly was officially a minor, and Sheba's actions were, officially speaking, exploitative; yet any honest assessment of their relationship would have to acknowledge not only that Connolly was acting of his own volition but that he actually wielded more power in the relationship than Sheba." That is often the case.

A very good read.

While not exactly what I was expecting, this was a story of obsession on more than one level. Told from the secondhand point of view, it's hard to know by the end of the story if the narrator is entirely reliable -- she's a bitter, egotistical, & haughty older woman retelling the story of her co-worker's obsession with a teenage student. I found myself not particularly liking either character very much, for different reasons, & I think this dulled my enjoyment of the novel. This was fairly well written, but just not as fulfilling as I'd hoped. ( )