GUEST WRITER WHITNEY MILLER RECOMMENDS THE BEAUTY OF US BY FARZANA DOCTOR
The Beauty of Us is a YA novel that unfolds at Thornton, a boarding school in Belltown, Ontario. It’s the start of a new school year and among the throng of teachers and students, we meet the story’s three main characters and narrators – Zahabiya, Leesa and Nahla.
Zahabiya is new at Thornton. Her mom died of cancer four years ago and she’s hoping for a fresh start. Leesa is maneuvering to cement her position with the elites at the school while secretly in a sexual relationship with a man 12 years her senior. Nahla, 24, is the new French teacher and residence monitor. Her excitement about her new job is tinged with sadness – her father has stopped speaking to her because she decided to live on her own, away from her family.
It feels like anything can happen at Thornton. Teenagers outnumber adults, and the lines of authority blur as the teachers, students and administrators mingle in close quarters. Adding to the feeling of precariousness is the school itself. Despite its good reputation, the food at Thornton is bad and the dorms are dilapidated.
The Beauty of Us is mostly “whodunit”, with a sexual predator standing in place of a murderer. To uncover the perpetrator, Zahabiya and her friends use surveillance techniques while Zahra works to decode the cryptic entries in a notebook left by Sylvie Leblanc, Zahra’s predecessor who died suddenly over the summer. The suspense is infused with an element of the supernatural – Nahla receives regular visits from Sylvie’s ghost.
Zahabiya’s crew solves the mystery well before the last page, and we are left to watch the characters grapple with the fallout. These moments reinforced for me what I like most about this book: that the characters are not caricatures. The author, Farzana Doctor, doesn’t feel the need to make the story tidy for her readers. It’s not politically correct, or incorrect. There is no moralizing, or “I told you so”; no demons and no angels. It tells a story of a place, a time, an event and the people involved. And like in life, there isn’t an ending, but instead a transition, a turn of the page, and a new season.
Whitney Miller likes conversation, dancing, and being outside on a warm day. A Haligonian exiled to Toronto for nearly 25 years, she is relieved to be back in the Martimes for teacher training at UNB.