CY@CY Says Welcome to my dreamscape. Where a Lim is also a Ling.
A taboo subject. That’s what The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman is about. It is a genuinely disturbing drama of a sexual relationship between a forty-something lady teacher and an underage student. It’s sick and twisted and just plain wrong but you can’t stop reading it. It also sounds like it could be plucked from the headlines.
The Kingdom of Childhood by Rebecca Coleman
Judy McFarland is a kindergarten teacher at Sylvania Waldorf School, a school run on the Rudolf Steiner philosophy that childhood should be pure and untainted by adult concerns. Judy’s relationship with her husband has deteriorated to the stage where she is considering divorce. Her daughter has moved away to university, her son spends most of his time with his girlfriend and she feels lonely and is tired of going through the motions.
When Judy is thrown together to work on a school project with Zach Patterson, a sixteen-year-old classmate of his son, things start to spiral out of control. Zach is facing a struggle as he knows his mother is having an extramarital affair behind his father’s back. Judy and Zach begin an affair that at first thrills and then corrupts each of them. Judy sees in Zach the elements of a young German man she loved as a child.
As time passes, the affair between them begins to eat away at each of them. Judy’s common sense is blurred and her morality compromised. Zach sees how their affair is corrupting both of them and attempts to put an end to it. Despite knowing how serious the legal consequences of their clandestine relationship are, Judy comes unhinged and her sexual predations become more pathetic, even brutish.
Flashbacks fill in Judy’s childhood spent in Germany, where early traumas—mentally unstable mother, philandering father—took root. These events in her childhood have moulded her to be the woman she is now.
This book is equal parts enchanting and unsettling, taking you into the mind-set of Judy, the perpetrator. While the beginning of the relationship is queasy because of the gaps in age between the participants, it has the enthusiastic consent of Zach. He is the one to initiate their first kiss, and pursuing Judy provides him with a thrill – at first. Later, as Judy becomes increasingly needy and desperate for sex with Zach, their relationships become ever-more disturbing. Due to the subject matter, this book is not for everyone.