Since this book is partly about a bunch of teenagers trying to get accepted into a top dramatic academy, I have an excuse to tell you a recent sad-but-true anecdote, which featured my daughter's fellow-Corridor (that's their band) named Helena. If you've seen the youtube videos (and they really want you to!) she's the very tall, very thin, quite pretty and extremely blonde one. She's a good actress (I've seen her in school plays) and a good singer & dancer and she's totally in love with acting. So with all that going on she thought she'd be able to get into a top dramatic academy. (This is the frantic year when they're all applying to university). So she went to the first audition. She's been used to acting & performing with a lot of different types of kids, it's an extremely mixed school. The casts of all the shows she's ever been in (a lot) have been black, brown, short, tall, all kinds of kids, all jazzed with acting like some kids are. When she came back from the first audition she was devastated. She was thinking : I'm sunk, I'll have to think of something else. Why ? Because when she walked into the room and met the other wannabe actors, they were all extremely tall extremely thin extremely blonde pretty 18 year old girls. No one else had applied. The whole room was full of Helenas. 
 I thought I'd read The Rehearsal because I just didn't fancy the 2000-page-long Luminaries, all the reviews gave me the idea it was a little bit too meta, a gigantic brainy well-written shaggy-dog story, or maybe a shaggy-god story, which would be worse. So I thought, let's try the first slender novel instead. Maybe that will inspire me. But it uninspired me. 
 This story has two parts to it. The kids auditioning for the academy is one and the scandal of a girl being sexually abused by her music teacher is another. Both of these plot strands are groanworthy, especially the latter, because we have had a lot of this kind of thing in the history of fiction. Tampa, Notes on a Scandal, Innocents, 
 heck, it's a sub-division of fiction : 
 http://www.maryse.net/books/book-reco... 
 Here it's the psychological aftermath of the abuse rather than the thing itself, but still, you get to wear the been there done that t shirt. 
 Dull subjects can be made into great novels, everyone knows that. Look at Ulysses - guys wander about Dublin and drink in pubs. Molly Bloom shags her boyfriend. End of story. For 900 pages. Look at Moby Dick. Boy meets whale, boy loses whale, boy can't take no for an answer and pursues whale. For 900 pages. Look at Jean Rhys's four novels - woman mopes around. That's it. But this one.... I could tell Eleanor Catton could turn a deft phrase and make many astringent observations, but I just didn't want 300 pages of deft phrases & astringent observations about teenagers and their trembling psyches and undulating nether regions. Not right now, and maybe never.