THE PHOENIX HOUR

We pay dearly for fruit out of season"", and the price tag here, in an exceptionally knowing and understanding first novel, is on the attachment of an English school teacher for one of her young students. Mrs. Conway who is thirty odd, and lonely, sees the face of the husband, who had left her for a procreative mistress, in that of a seventeen year old boy, Henderson, who is as much the child she never had as the man she had lost. While by no means unaware of the feelings which are revived in the phoenix hour of her life, they remain unspoken to the inevitable conclusion at the end of the year and the pain of separation from all the children who are hers- but not hers, and in particular Henderson.... The writer has handled an always difficult theme with discretion, and there's a contrasting frame of reference from the bloom of young love in the Sixth Form to the nasty interchanges in the staff room of this British grammar school. Sarah Kilpatrick is a very nice writer indeed.