It’s Nonfiction November and as the start of my TBR was pretty well nonfiction anyway, it was easy to pick this one off the shelves for an “upstairs” read while I plugged away at a huge review book downstairs. I acquired this in the long-ago-seeming days when my friend Gill and I used to meet at the local cafe for a coffee and drop some BookCrossing books off on their shelves – I grabbed this one when she brought it in for that purpose.

Anon – “The Secret Teacher”

(01 September 2019 – from Gill, via BookCrossing)

This book didn’t really know whether it wanted to be a jokey exposé of the life of a newly qualified English teacher (we follow him through three years of post-qualification teaching in various year-groups of a secondary school), a heartfelt plea for consistency, old-fashioned teaching and care or a personal memoir of family and loss.

There were some affecting moments, e.g. when teaching a child living on the autistic spectrum helped him to teach everyone more effectively, but also knowing the children were amalgams of his actual experience didn’t really help me engage with the book. Interesting but not vital.

Because my NetGalley percentage has dropped (shock!) I’m actually reading a bit of fiction at the moment, picking off Nic Stone’s “Dear Martin”, which I bought on Amazon, and “Dear Justyce”, the sequel, which came via NetGalley. But then I’ll get back to the non-fiction.