THE SWALLOWS (2019)

The Swallows by Lisa Lutz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It took me forever to read The Swallows. I was first drawn to the story by the boarding school setting, but the cacophony of voices telling the story in first person was a challenge. And although the story was darkly humorous, it was rather unpleasant. Relevant to the #MeToo conversation, the boys take and share revealing pictures of girls and rate sexual encounters. The battle eventually turns into a war where no one is left unscathed.

FIRST LINE: "Some teachers have a calling. I'm not one of them."

THE STORY: Alex Witt reluctantly takes a job teaching creative writing at an elite Vermont boarding school where her parent's friendship with the Headmaster means her recent past will be overlooked. 

It starts with a simple writing prompt from Alex Witt in her effort to get to know the students. When the answers raise disturbing questions, Ms. Witt suspects there's more going on at the school than the faculty wants to see.

WHAT I THOUGHT: I am always attracted to a story that takes place in a boarding school, but apparently I wasn't the only reader who found the book slow going (It took me over two months to finish.) Filled with anonymous notes and secret meetings, Lutz pays homeage to spy novels with a reference to Magnus Pym, a double agent in a book by John le Carré. The actual writing is sharp and funny. And, by the way, swallow has many meanings. One is "a female agent employed to seduce people for intelligence purposes." You can guess at the others.

I enjoyed her earlier book, The Passenger, a thriller, but I'm not familiar with the Spellman series.

BOTTOM LINE: Some reviewers loved this book, some reviewers did not finish reading. The amount of frank sexual description may be too much for some readers.

Disclaimer: A copy of The Swallows was provided to me by Ballantine Books/Net Galley for an honest review.

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher:  Ballantine Books (August 13, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1984818236
ISBN-13: 978-1984818232

Lisa Lutz is the New York Times bestselling author of the six books in the Spellman series, Heads You Lose (with David Hayward), and How To Start A Fire. Her latest offering is the thriller The Passenger (March, 2016 from S&S).

Lutz has won the Alex award and has been nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. Although she attended UC Santa Cruz, UC Irvine, the University of Leeds in England, and San Francisco State University, she still does not have a bachelor's degree. Lutz spent most of the 1990s hopping through a string of low-paying odd jobs while writing and rewriting the screenplay Plan B, a mob comedy. After the film was made in 2000, she vowed she would never write another screenplay. She lives in the Hudson Valley, New York. .(from Amazon)