As she narrates her past to Straightly we see how the trauma of her brother’s disappearance affected her life, and the struggles she had to overcome to be where she is now. Rebecca is a very driven character, who has spent her career fighting for her job, a female teacher in schools dominated by male masters, and is the first female head of St Oswalds.
A Narrow Door is a very character driven book, told from the perspective of Rebecca Buckfast and Roy Straightly, both of whom have appeared in the previous books, Rebecca as Becky Price. She has a way of really getting under the skin of her characters, capturing their every feeling and thought, building a three dimensional image so that you feel you really know them. What I admire most about Joanne Harris’s books is her wonderful characters. Written with style and substance this is a dark slow burner of a thriller. And so a story unfolds, a mystery that started with the disappearance of Rebecca’s brother when she was five, and the aftermath of that incident.
But not even a dead body will stop Rebecca in her tracks, her ambition and need to excel are all that matters. The day before term starts a group of students comes to Straightley to say they think their is a body in the excavated ground where the new swimming pool is due to be built. A Narrow Door sees changes to St Oswalds, a new female head in Rebecca Buckfast and the merger of St Oswalds with the neighbouring girls school Mulberry House, both of which fill Roy Straightly with fear and dread as he favours the more traditional approach. You don’t need to have read the previous books to enjoy this, each is set in a different time with it’s own plot line. A Narrow Door is the third book in the Malbry Cycle of books, and takes the reader back to St Oswalds boy school,and to the classroom of Classics Master, Roy Straightly. I have been a huge fan of her writing since reading Chocolat over twenty years ago. I was really excited when I received the notification from NetGalley to say I had been approved for A Narrow Door by Joanne Harris. She’ll bury the past so deep it will evade even her own memory, just like she has done before. And with it, the remains of a body are discovered.īut Rebecca is here to make her mark. As the new regime takes on the old guard, the ground shifts.
Barely forty, she is just starting to reap the harvest of her ambition. Rebecca Buckfast has spilled blood to reach this position.
For the first time in its history, a headmistress is in power, the gates opening to girls. It’s an incendiary moment for St Oswald’s school. Now I’m in charge, the gates are my gates.
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