This
is a well written book with a lovely prose style but the plot is
unbelievable and the characters are either not likeable or completely
weird.
Mona,
the main protagonist is a flawed, confused and withdrawn twenty year old who
takes solace in numbers. Her relationships with other adults including her family is
difficult. Her father became ill when she was ten and since then she
has withdrawn more and more from life. She becomes a primary maths
teacher and this novel tells of her experiences with the children and
the way she reacts to their needs and how she is challenged and reacts as a result.
Mona
is hired to be a primary school maths teacher. She has no teaching
qualification but has always had a thing for numbers. Perhaps this
could happen in the USA but most countries expect teachers to be
college trained! She doesn't act rationally and does silly things. I
thought the most stupid was taking an axe into her classroom to
represent a number “7”. She hung it on her wall which of course
led to it being in the hands of a child in a tantrum with disastrous
results. She does have considerable success in enthusing young children to like numbers.
Instead
of being sympathetic to Mona I found myself getting annoyed with her
for her irrational and incomprehensible behaviour. She shows signs of
mental disturbance by knocking on wood in time to her breathing when
she gets stressed. Her next door neighbour is a former maths teacher
who now runs a hardware store. He too has a strange relationship with
numbers and is also mentally unbalanced.
Fiction
is an opportunity to work out how other peoples minds work from the
inside. This can work really well and offer unique insights into very
different perspectives on the world. Perhaps the best example of this
is “The curious incident of the dog in the night time” where the
world is seen through the eyes of a person with autism.
Unfortunately, I didn't find it worked here, perhaps because the plot
was weak and confusing. Also I found the ending to the book
unsatisfying as it didn't come to an end but stopped without a
resolution. I didn't like the book but others have given it good
reviews, so perhaps it was just me!
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