Told by a niece of a Teacher on the Prairies and then moves to Ottawa. Lives encountered as students, friends and relatives. Murder of a young girl and the quest for who did it runs through the tale.

“Alone in the classroom” is an interesting twist of murder mystery and relationship novel. The novel deals with the life of Connie Flood, an eighteen-year-old-teacher who is working in a small town in Saskatchewan. While Connie is working in Saskatchewan a fifteen-year-old student, Susan, is sexually assaulted by the school principal. Connie develops a special relationship with one of her students, Michael, who is struggling in school. Seven years later in the Ottawa valley an eight-year-old girl goes berry picking and is found murdered. The narrator, Ann Flood, effectively connects these two mysteries. The appeal factors of this novel are realistic and well-drawn characters.

Good book

I agree with much of what has already been said, in terms of the main character. She was the weakest link in the book. I had no desire to read about her, and instead would have preferred the book to focus on her aunt and the main people in her aunt's life. While the first half of the book was very interesting, I found towards the end that the story became very disjointed and meandered all over the place. All in all I was disappointed with this book. Hay's previous book was much better. I would not recommend anyone read this.

The second book I've read of Hay's, after Late Nights on Air (which was superb). Like other readers, I found the narrator's story to be much less interesting than those of Connie, Parley and Michael, and didn't much like Anne anyway. Or at least I found her/the affair storyline to be selfish and stupid/implausible, respectively. As a result, that part of the story felt a little clunky and messy, detracting from the stories of Connie et al, and my reading experience overall.

Not my favorite from EH. Too many story lines, and in the end I couldn't care less about the main plot. The sub-plots definitely shone brighter for me than the main character, who was boring and self-centered.

This book began with some promise. However, as I continued on, I began scanning pages and skipping over others. Disconnected stories of people combined with fillers of , etc., contributed to making this something of a boring read. The only character who is lost amongst the others is Connie. I'm amazed at the number of holds on this book.

Hay's latest book is her best so far, but I still found the characters confused and confusing.

another great book by elizabeth hay...i love her writing, you can picture/smell/feel everything....almost poetic, succinct....great read

I cannot believe that an author of Hay's ability could have started this project with an end to finishing it as she did. The initial insertion briefly of first person Anne (a writer, we eventually discover, of Hay's sex, generation and mother's locale which tempts the reader into visions of creative non-fiction,) almost incidentally made the set up needlessly complex if not convoluted. It distracted greatly from what I found to be a story as gripping and powerful as Late Nights on Air, a story that crashed and burned in the final hundred pages as the reader was dragged back into a character with no story of her own except a vague resemblance to a prize winning author. The story that I loved belonged to Connie (why would any reader care whose aunt she might have been) who adored and was adored by one of her students. The story that I loved hinged perfectly on a paradox of how affection born in that thrilling/ terrifying setting of a classroom after all but one student has escape to their own lives can magically heal or monstrously harm a student. That story focused on a protagonist with courage and intelligence. It focused on two unfortunate children, one cursed with dyslexia, the other with physical beauty. It examined all that is evil and good in a public education structure where one person is all powerful and others are powerless. The tension built. The trap set. A hero was either to be crowned or her failure to be mourned. Society as much as any character was ready to face its judge. Re-enter Anne. The reader is expected to abandon thoughts of abuse and impropriety, justice and common sense in favour of genealogy and random homilies about minor characters. The reader is expected to pretend this was all a set up for the Sisterhood of the Travelling Boyfriend. Suddenly coincidences become outrageous. And when Anne apologizes to the reader for "coming at the story sideways" what Hay is really apologizing for is abandoning the real story for endless passages of "filler" about where that story might have (probably did according to the acknowledgments) come from in "real" time.