Audiobook10 hours
The Chatham School Affair
Written by Thomas H. Cook
Narrated by George Guidall
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
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About this audiobook
Nominated three times for the Edgar Award, Thomas H. Cook continues to mesmerize readers with novels that combine tales of passion and intrigue with the best in page-turning suspense. Listeners find his pensive, lyrical style irresistible. As lawyer Henry Griswald draws up an aging client's will, he reflects on a series of events in 1926-1927 that shattered the peace of his boyhood community. Griswald, then a student at the school where his father was headmaster, witnessed a passion that would change him forever. At the heart of Griswald's reverie lies a mystery only he can solve. What really happened at Black Pond-a tragedy that eventually destroyed five lives? Seeing his boyhood memories through the eyes of experience and age, Griswald relives the emotion-charged chain of events. As he pieces the tantalizing puzzle together, he also pulls the listener into a growing awareness of the terrible consequences of his childish vision.
Author
Thomas H. Cook
THOMAS H. COOK was born in Fort Payne, Alabama. He has been nominated for Edgar Awards seven times in five different categories. He received the Best Novel Edgar, the Barry for Best Novel, and has been nominated for numerous other awards.
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Reviews for The Chatham School Affair
Rating: 4.214285714285714 out of 5 stars
4/5
14 ratings10 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Good story. What I didn't like,foreshadowing was overdone making for a very frustrating read. Story goes back and forth in time and it seemed I would just start getting into the time frame and it would change. Not enough time to really sink your teeth into the past or present. Again very frustrating. This is the first time I have read this author and I'm not sure if I would read him again,even as interesting as his stories do look to be.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I love thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, horror, but rarely read them because I don't care for the writing style. So I was so excited when I found Thomas H. Cook who can write like an angel and tell a whopping good story.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed this book immensely. It's at once mysterious and well-written.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Chilling portrait of lives that come apart because of love between two teachers at a proper, conservative boys school. The story's narrator is an old man looking back on the events and remembering his role as the adolescent son of the school's headmater. Superb Story Telling!! SS
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chatham School Affair occurs in 1927. Elizabeth Channing's father had just died and she had come to Chatham School to be the new art teacher. Her father was a free thinker who believed that the passion an artist feels must be the artist's guide not the morals of others that are there only as a restraiant on the spirit of the artist.. The head master's 15 year old son, Henry Griswald is someone who already feels the suffocation of his own father's world and wants desperately to escape. When Ms. Channing begins a relationship with a fellow teacher who is married and has a child, Henry becomes their ally and wants them to be able to escape from Chatham and all the restraints he feels. This is the simple story that is The Chatham School Affair.There are two ways that the reader can look at this story. The first is the normal view that the author, Thomas H. Cook wrote the book and is solely responsible for the story. From the viewpoint, there is a heavy sense of foreboding from the very first page with the now almost 90 year old narrator, Henry Griswald, slowly telling the story in retrospect. The author tells the story in a very evocative, beautiful fashion, slowly having Henry divulge the secrets from 7 decades earlier. There is a very real sense of withholding information from the reader that is essential for the purpose of increasing the suspense for the reader. But at times this almost feels like the author does not actually have enough story to fill-up his book and is trying to stretch the story out long enough to still have something left to divulge when we get to the end. That in fact the foreshadowing of what will eventually occur feels heavy handed at times, even overwrought and repetitive.The second way of looking at the story is to see the writer of the story as actually being Henry Griswald, not Thomas H. Cook. What this does is change how the reader views the telling of the story. If Thomas Cook is the writer, he is just using Henry as a device to tell his story to us and the deliberately slow pace and the stretching out of the story end up being frustrating to the reader at times. But if Henry Griswald wrote the book, then the very slow and very deliberate pace of the story is very much in synch with how people tell their tales. Children may in fact blurt out what they have done and feel great remorse, but grown-ups who have held back and resisted telling the truth for seventy years, even to themselves, tell the story very delibrately with no need to hurry up and reach the end of the story. Henry is not stretching out the story or with holding details from us, he is slowy and painfully telling us what happened and what he did.If you read this book as if Thomas Cook wrote the book, you will feel frutrated at times and want him to hurry up and tell the story instead of hiding behind the narrator's slow telling of the story. But if you read the book as if Henry Griswald did in fact write the book himself- that he is not just a device used by Thomas Cook - then you will be able to slow down and let Henry tell you the story at his own pace. It is a slow and in the end it becomes a painful story, but you won't need to try and hurry him up. You will come to see that he told the story the only way he could, after not telling it for 70 years, he could only tell it very slowly and very deliberately. And in the end, he finally tells it all, even the part he has never told anyone before.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent read..The small town Chatham comes alive in Cook's beautiful writing,characters are so well flushed out that you feel for them...The suspense element is so well maintained,you are in anticipation of what happens next and in a language that can be described as poetic..
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This remains one of my favorite of Cook's novels. Rich in atmosphere and question, it takes the reader into time and place so completely as to make the story remain lingering in your mind long after the last page is turned.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry Griswald, son of the Headmaster at Chatham School, recounts the events that unfolded in his hometown of Massachusetts back in 1926. As an adult, Henry remembers when a new teacher arrives at the private school for boys and introduces new thoughts and ideas to some eager minds. Over the years, the "flashback" strategy has grown on me. In some books, I wouldn't have wanted the story told in any other way. That is not true for this one - I would have preferred this memory to be told in a straight forward fashion. The frequent flashbacks (first half of the book) provided scant information and I just wanted it to move onward. The second half was much better regarding the flashbacks, but the details that were remembered (decades later) were implausible. So, ultimately it was good, but flawed in ways that impacted my enjoyment. There is still a book or two of Cook's earlier work on my TBR list that I would still like to read; this one hasn't deterred me. (3.5/5)Originally posted on: "Thoughts of Joy..."
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Elizabeth Channing arrives at Chatham, Massachusetts to be the new art teacher at the Chatham School. She's met at the station by Arthur Griswold, headmaster and his son, Henry, who will be a sophomore in the new school year.Channing is a romantic and Henry soon develops a puppy love for her.A domestic at his house, Sarah Doyle, asks Channing to teach her to read and she and Henry are often at Channing's cottage working on their studies.Leland Reed arrives to be the new poetry teacher. He's accompanied by his wife and small child. Reed and Channing are drawn together as the story moves back and forth between the peaceful start to the story and a trial taking place involving the characters.The reader isn't sure what crime was committed but there are parallels to Dreiser's "An American Tragedy."Winner of the Edgar Award, this is a story that will tug at the reader's heart as the characters are led to a tragedy that seems impossible to avert.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Henry is a student at Chatham School. His father is the headmaster who hires a beautiful and intelligent Elizabeth Channing as the art teacher. Henry is quite taken with Miss Channing's stories and her independent spirit and begins to believe that his life is boring and staid and wishes for the freedom to do as he pleases. Miss Channing and another teacher, Mr. Reed, who is married and the father of a young daughter, fall in love, and the story quickly turns dark. Henry sees them as a romantic couple who should be set free to live life with each other, and with words he very much lives to regret, he sets in motion tragic and fatal events that still haunt him when he is an old man and the narrator of the story. Excellent writing with a great twist at the end.