An invitation novelist Kersti Kuusk receives to attend the 100th anniversary of the boarding school she went to in Switzerland coincides with the news that one of her former classmates has died after a battle with cancer. In her last letter to Kersti, Lille reasserts that their mutual friend Cressida had not fallen by accident and that incriminating evidence to prove this might be found in the Helvetians ledger.
Canadian novelist Joanne Goodman’s novel The Finishing School toggles between the present, where Kersti and her husband Jay are struggling to conceive and Kersti is also out of ideas for her next novel, and the past, where Kersti’s time at the Lycee International Suisse is unspooled.
Born to Estonian immigrants, Kersti is the youngest of four sisters. The honour of attending the Lycee had fallen to Kersti because “her sisters didn’t have the grades to earn the Legacy Scholarship,” but Kersti also suspected that “her parents are sending her away because they’re exhausted.”
Kersti’s new roommate is the beyond beautiful Cressida.
…she’s far from ordinary. She has a beautiful, unruly mane of hair, spiraling out in all directions. Her head is just slightly to big for her slender body, but she’s dazzling, with pale green eyes, exquisitely long lashes, and a prominent, arched brow […] all of it together a masterpiece of teenage magnificence.
Kersti spends the next few years of high school loving and loathing Cressida in equal measure. Cressida can be a lot, but she is also fiercely loyal and generous and her friendship affords Kersti a life she would never have had access to otherwise.
We learn early on that Cressida had fallen from the balcony of her dorm room, and Lille’s letter many years later dredges up all those old memories. When Jay suggests that there might be a new novel in this story, it is both a distraction from Kersti’s failed attempts to get pregnant (which is causing a lot of strife in her otherwise happy marriage) and also sends her down a rabbit hole in an attempt to figure out what really did happen almost 20 years ago.
The Finishing School is a real page turner and also a book about friendship, motherhood and loyalty. I could barely put it down.
The Ludic Reader 