Product Description

Marigold Green calls herself 'hideous, quaint and barmy'. Other people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill's daughter. Growing up in a boys' school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #184964 in Books
• Published on: 1997-02-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

Review
'Lively..excellent' - THE TIMES 'One of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love' - EVENING STANDARD 'A striking story' - TLS

About the Author
Jane Gardam has been awarded the Heywood Hill Literary Prize for a lifetime's contribution to the enjoyment of literature; has twice won a Whitbread Award and has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Customer Reviews

Brilliant-helped me to grow up...
An ugly duckling tale with a difference. I stumbled on it in the school library when I was 17. At the time I was sitting Oxbridge exams and living with my widower father, so the characterisation certainly struck a chord! Thanks to Jane Gardam for letting me know that there were other awkward, academic, adolescent girls like me out there.

Delightful, touching, and very perceptive novel
This is the first book of Jane Gardam's that I've read and I was utterly captivated by it. Although it's many years since my adolescence, I think this captures perfectly the emotions and sensitivities of teenage girls, especially those who don't "fit in". I particularly enjoyed the section where she goes to stay at Jack's house and the scales fall from her eyes. It also has a good ending to a well-written and enjoyable story. I'll be looking out for more of her work.

A very accurate portrayal of a misfit teenager.
I loved this book when I was growing up because it was one of the very few books that seemed to reflect the way I thought. Marigold is an unfashionably "academic" teenager who doesn't quite fit in either with the girls at her own school or with the boys at the school where her father teaches. I love how she clams up when she tries to talk to the injured Jack, the object of her affections, and how when a friend gives her a makeover, the effect on her confidence doesn't last. Things come to a head during a weekend away when it turns out no-one is quite what they seem.

My only problem with this book was with the ending - I couldn't decide if it was meant to be real or fantasy, as it appears to show a much older Marigold meeting the grown-up daughter of two of the previously teenage characters, yet the main body of the book wasn't noticeably old-fashioned in setting. But the last 2 or 3 pages don't change the fact that the bulk of this book is one of the most true-to-life stories of adolescence I have ever read.