My Review
Thanks to the Angry Robot gang for sending me a copy of this book.
Thamarai is the new girl at the Government Girls Higher Secondary School in a small Tamil Nadu school. The teachers are mostly absent, the girls seem to be educating themselves, and there are supernatural entities infesting the place. Thamarai struggles with school, struggling to understand and remember the subject matter. She also falls in love with the other girls regularly. By 11th grade, she is in love with a clever girl named Prasana and has a love-hate friendship with a moderately clever girl named P.T. Priya.
There is a pervy teacher who teaches English and hates that girls are allowed to be educated at all. He also tries to ruin a girls reputation in the 11th or 12th every year. He asks inappropriate questions and bullies the other teachers as well as the girls. Everyone knows he’s a ‘porikki’ – I think that’s the equivalent of pervert. Nobody will say it though. The girl he’s abusing in Thamarai’s 11th is called P. Yumuna, the class leader.
P.T. Priya starts rumours about Yumuna and their English teacher. It gets tense until a teacher calls P. Yumuna a tart and the English teacher doesn’t do anything to help, dismissing her distress.
Over the year, Thamarai, Priya and Prasana tussle over whether they should do something to help Yumuna or do something about the English teacher, but feel helpless.
During the same year, while trying to work out how to fight the English teacher, Thamarai defeats a supernatural entity haunting P.T. Priya’s old house, finds the extra first floor, and makes entries in the titular Compendium. At the end of the year, she gives up on her studies and fights for the rights of the girls to not be abused by their teachers. It all happens on the Phantom First Floor.
The final few pages covers 12th and the future of some of the characters.
It took me a bit if time to get into this story. It’s not a long book, 166 pages, but I spent longer reading it than I thought I would. I kept having to take breaks while reading it. It was hard work at times. I think it was because all of the dialogue is in a dialect I’m unfamiliar with. I had to look up some of the words.
The supernatural elements were described in entries from the Compendium before they appear in the story. The book they’re written in is supernatural in itself; only Thamarai can read it and everyone thinks she’s crazy. She’s seeing things that no one else can.
I think the supernatural elements are a metaphor for the difficulties of being a teenage girl who likes girls in a place that is not safe for women and girls. Possibly, Thamarai is also dyslexic or has dyscalculia, and she’s trying to get an education without any parental or teacher support at all, so she’s given up. The horror is in the real world events that control the girls, not the weird creatures that inhabit the school. Only Thamarai can see them.
The setting seems very realistic, although I have nothing to base my beliefs on. I have read about the experiences of girls in India – there are horrific stories of abuse and assault on school girls going to or from school. I don’t want to make assumptions, but the author moved to Tamil Nadu from Manitoba at 13 and lives in India as an adult. Presumably she went through the secondary school system and knows what people are like in small town Tamil Nadu. She’s drawing on those experiences and adding supernatural entities.
It’s really immersive weird fiction and I loved the experience once I got into the story. I was rooting for the girls to thrive and found Thamarai’s ending sad.
