Tag by Stephen May (Cinnamon) KATHRYN EASTMAN
I met Stephen May on a Writers’ Retreat at Moniack Mhor, Scotland's Creative Writing Centre, in summer 2006. Stephen was working on a novel about a gifted teenage girl and one of her male teachers. Their story became TAG, Stephen's debut novel, published by Cinnamon Press.
TAG stands for Talented and Gifted: 15-year old Mistyann Rutherford is chosen to go on a special week-long residential course in Wales along with eight other gifted teenagers. Her 41-year-old teacher Jonathan Diamond, once considered gifted himself, has to forfeit his half-term holiday and accompany her there in the role of responsible adult.
They tell the story in alternate chapters and this took some getting used to, especially after the shorter chapters. However, it does mean that the story is told from both viewpoints, almost simultaneously.
Chapter One belongs to Mistyann and this sets the tone for the book. She is by far the more dominant of the two, while also being a whole heap of trouble. Jonathan Diamond, or JD as Mistyann dubs him, doesn't stand a chance when pitted against her. Stephen writes her extremely well, and she appeals even when she perhaps shouldn't because of her antics.
Surprisingly, because he is male and close to the author's own age, JD works less well. For a professional male who apparently physically resembles Tom Cruise, JD seems amazingly unprepossessing and aimless. Mid-life crisis? Possibly, but it niggled throughout.
However, any quibbles are minor. TAG is a strong debut and an extremely rewarding read: it has an alluring, gifted but dangerous, teenage protagonist; the cast of characters is intriguing; the plot ever so plausible given the characters involved; and Mistyann's story especially stays with you long after you finish reading.
I'd recommend TAG over another Cinnamon title, The Schoolboy by Holly Howitt (reviewed in Square 6). Both books contain excellent writing and better realised teenage characters than adult ones but I felt that overall Stephen's was the more satisfying story and realistic depiction of a relationship between a teenage pupil and their teacher of the two. The violent and disturbing nature of Holly's book wasn't the problem so much as my resistance toward empathising with her teenage character, Nick, who is pathologically unbalanced and intent on blaming everyone but himself. That, together with my inability to accept that a Headmaster would ever have behaved in the way in which the one in her book did, makes me prefer TAG. It has characters behaving recklessly and impulsively but their actions don't seem so much of a leap or as hard to either accept or understand.
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