THE HAPPENINGS AT NORTH END SCHOOL

by Hila Colman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 9, 1970

Proceeding Up the Down Staircase is Jennie Jameson, liberal arts grad who'd do right by her ghetto charges without priding herself on doing good--which she does, mostly, though without the immediacy, the volatility or half the credibility of Sunny Decker's Empty Spoon, Herndon's The Way It's Spozed To Be, etc., etc. What fiction supplies is a definite sense of Jennie's isolation arid alienation in a Connecticut industrial town: but it also provides her with a foil/flame in the person of handsome, well-groomed, well-mannered (the unkempt are no-account here) Peter Yates, a money-minded pragmatist who embarks on teaching to avoid the draft and winds up renewing his contract and marrying idealistic quasi-radicaL Jennie. To a festive send-off from her pupils: ""All my straggling kids had been transformed into a working unit."" Failures have been acknowledged but that's still attributing a good deal to a surprise party that has anyhow the hollow tinkle of a juvenile wrap-up, while the to-bed-or-not-to-bed dialogue (they do, dimly) tends to disqualify it as the career romance it might almost be taken for.

Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1970

Categories: FICTION