The Glass House
By Sophie Cooke,
Rupa, £ 7.95

Expelled recently from her boarding school, Vanessa finds herself stranded in a schizophrenic world, where ?nothing is what it seems?. She is only fourteen, and her growing pains are compounded by her complex relationship with her family members, including her two sisters, Lucy and Bryony, and especially her mother, Mary, who is suffering from a deep emotional crisis. They live in a glass house, which also symbolizes the world Vanessa inhabits. She is persistently haunted by, and ends up hunting, images, either opaque or splintered, and always fleeting.

Intensely introverted, Vanessa takes time off her glass-house chores and strolls through the bivouac of the Southern Highland hills and knolls, hedges and heaths, often soaking herself in the river. In such freak-trips, she often has company in the form of Alan McAlpline. He is a boy of about her age to whom she takes a fancy. But Alan does not find an easy access to her life even as he is allowed to make love to her.

Vanessa?s mother, on the other hand, has been through a rather disappointing extra-marital affair with one Mr Crawford. She now starts depending heavily on her daughter, after a long strain in the relationship. From this point, Vanessa?s mother and her lover are the two characters under whose influence Vanessa?s transition to adolescence takes place.

Sophie Cooke charts out this transition rather well given that The Glass House is her first novel. Her prose is nimble, and she displays sensitivity in portraying the toss-and-tumble of relationships. And then there are the light, jaunty and free-floating images. Vanessa explores failed relationships, which, when they were on, were brittle, yet reflective. Vanessa drifts in and out of these relationships just as she moves in and out of her glass house. She is at once detached and involved, looking at her world from inside herself and also at her ?inside? from a point of remove.

Cooke deals with a complicated theme and for someone writing her first novel, it is not a small challenge. To be fair to her, Cooke meets the challenge with poise and ?lan.