![]() Yet the way it beckons to a more adult story is what makes it topical. ![]() ![]() Abigail is a wonderful read, full of mysteries and surprises, all set off, like the Harry Potter books or Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep, by the strange, self-enclosed world of the boarding school. The magic of Abigail is that the schoolgirl story is a kind of sleight of hand covering a different story of much more import than Gina’s travails. It’s the Bishop Matula Academy, known as the Matula. Abigail sets out as a coming of age novel, the 14-year-old Gina Vitay swept away from her luxurious life in Budapest to a stark, fortress-like girl’s boarding school in the provinces. “The change that came about in her life robbed her of so much it was as if a bomb had destroyed her home,” begins this novel from 1970 by Hungary’s Magda Szabo. ![]()
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