Sabine

Lust and mischief erupt amid a group of languorous 17-year-old mostly English aristocrats at a boarding school in the French provinces circa 1958. Author "A.P." assumes the voice of one of the five youths, Viola, who writes in hindsight: a motherless only child, Viola is sent by her fashionable father to the lax, elderly "Tante Aimée," who runs the derelict chateau academy. Viola & Co. are squirming with boredom when the medical student Sabine arrives as an emergency substitute instructor. An intellectual only slightly older than they who hails from a genteelly impoverished family of the region, Sabine is as irreverent as James Dean, and as dangerously irresistible. Sabine lambastes Viola, who becomes her favorite, for living in a "soap bubble" of privilege, and exhorts her to embrace longing, fury, humiliation, suffering—in short, to live. Viola obliges by falling passionately in love with her instructor—and is shattered when her lovely, ferocious beloved accepts the advances of the most eligible young bachelor of the school's chateau set. When Viola grows bizarrely convinced that Sabine's illness is the result of vampirism, the novel turns pure, over-the-top, one-handed camp. Anonymous A.P marvelously re-creates the hormonal anguish of the fey teenagers. (Oct.)