Sabine

A sensual and Gothic tale of obsession and sexual awakening, Sabine is a tasty literary treat by an anonymous author that features old money and older secrets, spoiled schoolgirls, lesbians, and a school that may or may not be run by a vampire. It is the 1950s and existentialism is flourishing in Paris. But Viola, a seventeen year-old English girl, is languishing in an elite boarding school in the dull French countryside. Under the distracted tutelage of Aimée, the students lounge about the crumbling gray château playing records and smoking Gitanes, awaiting the arrival of some suitable distraction. Then a new teacher arrives—Sabine—with her long tanned legs and mane of golden hair. Sabine questions everything and challenges the girls to look at their world anew. Passion strikes Viola. But there are sinister forces at play in the château and when Sabine becomes ill with a blood disorder, Viola uncovers a dangerous secret. Smart, sexy, and atmospheric, Sabine is a tale of schoolgirl love with a gripping mystery that leaves you turning back to the first page after you’ve finished the last.

From Publishers Weekly

Lust and mischief erupt amid a group of languorous 17-year-old mostly English aristocrats at a boarding school in the French provinces circa 1958. Author "A.P." assumes the voice of one of the five youths, Viola, who writes in hindsight: a motherless only child, Viola is sent by her fashionable father to the lax, elderly "Tante Aimée," who runs the derelict chateau academy. Viola & Co. are squirming with boredom when the medical student Sabine arrives as an emergency substitute instructor. An intellectual only slightly older than they who hails from a genteelly impoverished family of the region, Sabine is as irreverent as James Dean, and as dangerously irresistible. Sabine lambastes Viola, who becomes her favorite, for living in a "soap bubble" of privilege, and exhorts her to embrace longing, fury, humiliation, suffering—in short, to live. Viola obliges by falling passionately in love with her instructor—and is shattered when her lovely, ferocious beloved accepts the advances of the most eligible young bachelor of the school's chateau set. When Viola grows bizarrely convinced that Sabine's illness is the result of vampirism, the novel turns pure, over-the-top, one-handed camp. Anonymous A.P marvelously re-creates the hormonal anguish of the fey teenagers. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Viola recalls being sent from her native England in the 1950s to a dull French finishing school led by a dotty, deceptive, and definitely unqualified schoolmistress, Aimee. The students housed in the decrepit chateau puff cigarettes, play at doing lessons, and wait for some excitement. Enter Sabine, a medical student from the nearby village, and Viola gets more excitement than she bargained for. The anonymous author of this ardent girl-for-girl romance evokes the mesmerizing quality of a dream at dusk, meshed with an appropriately overheated, breathless, and hormone-driven narrative voice. Aimee's endless efforts to fix up Sabine with Roland, the handsome son of local gentry, drive Viola mad with jealousy, although she is careful to avoid any authentic displays of emotion that might betray her. Yet she refuses to leave Sabine's bedside when the older girl falls ill. Some sort of fever is raging through the school, or is it something far more sinister? A. P. has crafted an irresistible gothic potboiler. Whitney ScottCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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