Bridge writes elegantly and has great perception about the foibles of adolescent girls and the social pressure they are under. Gangs of glamorous bullies are intimidating to most of us nerds. Bridge also expresses a realistic understanding of mother/daughter relationships, the breakdown of confidence and the inability to share inner terrors.

The Eliot Girls takes place in Toronto, where there are several established girls’ schools catering to the well-heeled. It’s fun to imagine which school could fit Bridge’s description. I suspect it is a bit of a pastiche of all of them. What happens at the Eliot school does happen at public high schools too, where there are in-crowd groups and peer pressure and every teenage girl goes through experiences similar to Audrey’s. Bridge makes it easy for us to understand Audrey and this, coupled with the graceful prose of The Eliot Girls makes it an admirable read.

it is to the author’s credit that she shades this scene – and Ruth’s character – with sufficient nuance that we are able to comprehend, if not exactly endorse, the motives at work.

Also impressive is the characterization of Seeta, the bullying victim. Far from being a dove-like innocent, Seeta is arrogant and insufferable, her musical talent and academic achievement lending her a swelled head and inflated sense of self-importance. (She erroneously accuses Audrey of cheating off her in a math test.)

Less effective is the general vagueness of the book’s timeframe. ...Less effective is the general vagueness of the book’s timeframe. Whereas Swan’s novel was located specifically in the year 1963, it is impossible to tell precisely when The Eliot Girls is meant to take place. References to Lululemon outfits and cellphones abut apparently anachronistic details – Arabella’s knapsack has a button emblazoned with Alan Thicke’s image, and the girls taunt Seeta with a picture of Sissy Spacek from the 1976 Brian de Palma film Carrie. When Henry’s students resort to plagiarism on an English paper, they copy from Coles Notes, not Wikipedia.

Assuming a contemporary setting, it is interesting to note what these well-heeled, privileged adolescent girls don’t do: they don’t spend time talking on their smartphones, they don’t text or e-mail. Their bullying of Seeta consists not of uploading embarrassing videos to Facebook or YouTube, but rather sending anonymous threats made out of cut up newspaper headlines glued on cardboard, a mechanism more suited to 1940s film noir than a contemporary teenage milieu.

It is possible – even likely – that these details were left deliberately nebulous in an attempt to universalize the story. Or perhaps it is all meant ironically: the entire novel has a defiantly retro feel, right down to the paperback copy of D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow that serves double duty as a sly comment on the narrative and a significant plot point. But the net effect is to denude the story of much of its authority.

In her debut novel, Danuta Gleed Literary Award nominee Krista Bridge explores timeless and timely themes: adultery and psychological bullying among teen girls...The bullying that goes on at the academy does not involve social media or the Internet, which may strike readers as a missed opportunity to fully engage with the issue. And Bridge’s prose occasionally veers into the florid and overwritten..........Bridge wisely avoids the cliché of giving Audrey a crush on a boy – a welcome exclusion in a novel that, at its centre, is about a mother’s recklessness and her daughter’s awkward navigation of the social minefield that is teenage girlhood, a world fraught with what Audrey calls “the inescapability of humiliation.” -