Seventeen: The shocking true story of a teacher's affair with her student

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One of the strengths of “Seventeen” lies in Gibson’s ability to capture the emotional complexity of the protagonist’s experiences. It is a devastatingly evoked account of being a child subjected to abuse by a teacher, a tightly constructed story that somehow still manages to floor you, even when you're become used to its central premise.

You almost hope that Ali is ignorant or has a low IQ to make sense of her predatory behaviour, the idea of her being fully aware of her behaviour is petrifying. Ali was possessive, dismissive, controlling, belittling and it was painful to watch her chip away at his soul and for his innocence to send him bounding back like a puppy dog.These people clearly did not live in the ’60s and 70s during the period of the grand sexual awakening.

Being 17 is very hard, and you read the pressure Joe is under with what is happening with Miss P and her manipulated ways, keeping it all a secret and lying to friends and family, and school and you just want to hug him. As an adult reading this, Ali's behaviour screams of emotional immaturity and narcissism from very early on. It was quite cathartic to read, especially after listening to such an innocent narrator being invalidated and privately crumbling with no real support structure. I was a 16 year old boy in 1991 and a (female) teacher who was 49 at my boarding school who taught the younger boy’s not me.The White Witch, X-Men's Storm, Pennywise and The Mask: As stars get into the Halloween spirit - can YOU guess who's behind the costume? Gibson’s book shows the damage that can be wrought by impulsive actions and the awful and lasting consequences of abuse. Miss P decides when and where they can see each other, she ignores him for periods at school, and taunts him about being a school boy when it seems that he is trying to think for himself. Joe says in the acknowledgements that he hopes by finding his voice seventeen years later, and articulating his experience that he can encourage other people to do the same. It doesn’t have Nabokov’s poetic veil to cloud its harrowing subject matter, but the narrator’s increasing doubts, moments of weirdness, interspersed with the stereotypical depictions of a first love, create a similar effect on the reader - shock, nausea, and, most of all, pity for the victim - except greater, because his story is true.

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Written in the form of a fiction novel, I had to keep reminding myself all the way through that this is someone's real life and not some made up story that you can just push to one side and forget about. This insightful review delves into the heart-wrenching experiences of these students, highlighting the challenges they encounter and the impact it has on their lives. Part three of the memoir is “17 years later” but it is incredibly brief and left me with more questions than I started with. Thank you so much to Sabah Khan at Simon and Schuster for my finished copy in exchange for an honest review.