I bought this book based on an interview with Zoe Heller in The Morning News. The story was not what I thought it would be, in a very good way. On the surface, it is about a (female) teacher, Sheba, who has an affair with a (male) teenage student. After the first fifteen pages I realized it is as much, or more, about Sheba's friend, Barbara, who is taking care of Sheba in the heat of the scandal and has chosen to write down the story of Sheba's transgression. Heller masters the voice of this slightly unreliable narrator, who inadvertantly reveals, through reported dialogue and her own actions, more than she means to about herself.

This does not mean Heller lets the other characters off easily or typecasts them. Sheba is naive and selfish, breezily posh yet somehow a pathetic victim of the inscrutable, monosyllabic working-class boy she falls for. Heller also deftly manages the plot's revelations, which, though not earth-shattering, show her to be a decent storyteller and an excellent prose writer.