A coming of age story. An insight into a junior seminary. A glimpse of working class life in Britain in the nineteen fifties. Seminar Boy is all this and more.

Cornwall’s writing is easy to read and the story clips along at a pleasing pace. Cornwall, from London’s East End, ends up at the Cotton junior seminary almost on a whim. He didn’t hear God or Jesus calling him to serve. His parents fought frequently. Money was scarce to feed and clothe John and his four siblings.

He left one difficult situation for another. Priests had to be addressed as “sir”. Cornwall was caned for reading after lights-out. All the attendant angst, sexual repression and fear engendered by a cloistered virtually all-male environment is well described.

This memoir is more than a description of a boy’s experiences. It’s also the story of a search for a father figure and love. Cornwall leaves the priesthood at senior seminary. His decision is the culmination of years of repression and “outrageous and dogmatic demands”. The explanation could’ve been more detailed, along with why he joined the junior seminary. This doesn’t diminish what is a readable insight into a world of mystery.

Despite leaving the seminary, the Catholic religion never left Cornwall. The depth of his feeling and emotion comes across, especially in the book’s final part.
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One of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, the acclaimed writer John Cornwell has finally written his own story, and the story of a choice he had to make between the Church and a life lived outside its confines. John Cornwell decided to become a priest at the age of thirteen, a strange choice perhaps for a boy who'd been sent to a 'convalescent home' for having whacked a nun about the head. Growing up in a chaotic household, sharing two rooms with his brothers and sisters, his hot-headed mother and - when he was around - absconding father, John spent his time roaming the war-torn streets of London looking for trouble. One day, at his mother's suggestion, he responded to a call from his local parish priest for altar servers. The 'dance of the rituals', the murmur of Latin and the candlelit dawn took hold of his imagination and provided him with a new and unexpected comfort. He left post-war London for Cotton, a seminary in the West Midlands. In this hidden, all-male world, with its rhythms of devotion and prayer, John grew up caught between his religious feelings and the rough and tumble of his life back in London; between seeking the face of God in the wild countryside around him and experiencing his first kiss; between monitoring his soul and watching a girl from a moving train whose face he will never forget. Cornwell tells us of a world now vanished: of the colourful community of priests in charge; of the boys and their intense and sometimes passionate friendships; of the hovering threat of abuse in this cloistered environment. And he tells us of his struggle to come to terms with a shameful secret from his London childhood - a vicious sexual attack which haunts his time at Cotton. A book of tremendous warmth and humour, 'Seminary Boy' is about an adolescent's search for a father and for a home.

I was intrigued with the synopsis of the book as it returned me to one of my favorite cities and to a time period I remember well. I can’t say that I could relate to much else as I did not go to a college in the city, I did not take drugs and I certainly was not, nor am I currently rich. The job of a writer is to take the reader into a world and hopefully immerse them in a way that they forget their current reality and they live, at least for a while, within the two covers. There were hints of that in Ms. Firman’s writing; she certainly has a way with words. At some junctures in the book I would reread a sentence because it was just so beautifully written.

The story was not one I understood on any level. I could not grasp why Francesca was so drawn to these awful, awful people. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence would have run quickly in the opposite direction and yet she kept going back. It boggled my mind. I wanted to slap her.

The book was also full of references to designers, New York landmarks, obscure books and other name dropping that if the reader wasn’t aware of these things it would, I think make for jarring reading. I was familiar with New York and I read a LOT so I knew most of the references. I will admit that the name dropping got old after a bit.

Overall the city of New York was a stronger character than any of the humans in play. The book was diverting but I found it more frustrating than fascinating. It’s definitely a character driven novel and when you as a reader can’t understand the motivations of the main character you are going to have trouble with the book. I’ve seen others who loved it. And that is the glory of reading; one person’s great book is another’s not so great. ( )

Did you ever have a person or group of people in your life that were horrible for you, but exerted some kind of magical pull on your affections, time and interest? Did you ever know someone who was a bad influence, but you loved being with them? Who treated you horribly but somehow was the best thing that ever happened to you, and the worst all at the same time?

This novel is about such a relationship. The protagonist, "Chess" Varani, is recounting for us her admittedly unhealthy obsession with the amazing, maddening, tantalizing family known as the Marr-Lowensteins. She encounters Kendra first of all, Kendra the flighty, drug-addled, exciting, school-skipping rich kid with whom she forms an immediate inexplicable co-dependent relationship, if it can be called that, which consists mainly of Kendra using Chess for whatever the moment demands and then dropping out of her life for lengths of time. Chess is slowly drawn into the circle of the Marr-Lowensteins, eventually coming to work for the matriarch, Clarice, and must come to terms with her unhealthy relationship with this family, her own needs as a blossoming young adult, and whether or not to sever ties with them in order to go into the world and live a full and healthier life.

The book is a modern, or post-modern, bildungsroman, one that deals with an emotional and intellectual growing-up rather than a physical one. In the 1980s New York in which Chess struggles to survive, the pull from the Marr-Lowensteins is like the thrill of a cheap bodice-ripper: you know it's horrible for your constitution, but you just can't pull yourself away and have to read just one more chapter. The Marr-Lowensteins are dysfunctional in the extreme, and Clarice seems to be the chief culprit. Once taken under her wing, Chess can't seem to get out from under it, although she knows she is entangling herself in the family sickness.

As a coming of age tale, this is very well done. The Marr-Lowensteins become a surrogate family for Chess, one she is desperate for, at the same time that she realizes she's got to break away and live her own life. I thought the conflicts and confusions Chess faces were realistically complex and interesting.

The author structures this as a tale-within-a-tale. Chess is telling this story more than 20 years past these events, and the first third of the novel alternates between 20 years hence and the origin of the tale. This seems, at first, a mistake, especially because as the tale moves into the second third, Chess's more recent story, taking place in 2008, is dropped completely, until the very end of the book. However, when it is picked up again towards the end, the author's intent becomes clear: to show just how successful or unsuccessful Chess has been over the decades in emerging fully independent of her past. Whether or not, and how, she does, forms the last part of the novel.

One note: though I liked Chess, the author has her drop numerous -- i.e on almost every single page -- arcane literary and cultural references, to authors, poems, films, art, etc, and expect the reader to understand the significance of the reference. To wit: "I realized that her pose reminded me of a Giorgione: the Dresden Venus." "It put me in the mind of a certain kind of Nordic desolation, of Knut Hamsun walking around Christiania wretched with hunger." This is annoying, because I consider myself fairly cultured and well-read, and couldn't be in Chess's mind with her.

And one more note: can we be done with the "gritty 80s" thing? It's just so done to death at this point.

Thank you to the author and publisher for a review copy. ( )

There were really so many times that I wanted to put this book down, but I kept thinking that it would get better. Then I would get called away and come back to it and read a little and think I should find another book. Then again, I would get called away, come back to it and again think I should find another book. This kept happening to me. I think I only finished it because all of that happened. It is very rare that it takes me five days to read a book.

I do have to say that the there were a few highlights when some places were mentioned that I remember. Of course, that's not saying much.

I really found Francesa needed a life, a real life. She certainly was not getting one with the Loewstein family even if she thought she was. All of those people used her. A sad, sad story about a sad, sad girl with a sad, sad life.

Thanks Doubleday Books for approving my request and to Net Galley for providing a free e-galley in exchange for an honest unbiased review. ( )