Author(s): Rebecca Coleman

General Fiction

The Kingdom of Childhood is the story of a boy and a woman: sixteen-year-old Zach Patterson, uprooted and struggling to reconcile his knowledge of his mother's extramarital affair, and Judy McFarland, a kindergarten teacher watching her family unravel before her eyes. Thrown together to organize a fundraiser for their failing private school and bonded by loneliness, they begin an affair that at first thrills, then corrupts each of them. Judy sees in Zachthe elements of a young man she loved as a child, but what Zach does not realize is that their relationship is—for Judy—only the latest in a lifetime of disturbing secrets. This beautifully crafted debut novel by rebecca Co9leman is written in a literal style, but with commercial appeal and pacing, comparable to the gut-wrenching domestic unravelling in Sue Miller's "While I was gone", or Zoe Heller's "Notes on a scandal" , but narrated through the points of view of it's subjects - a 40 something kindergarten teacher and her teenage lover - rather than the observer. It's exploration of the controversial Waldorf School movement will captivate and provoke endless points for debate amongst readers, in that community and beyond. As Coleman takes the stuff of tabloids and grounds it in the recognisable world, the story is bound to attract wide interest among reading groups as we.. This isn't just a great read - it's controversial, unsettling and fascinating and promises to be the book people will be talking about this spring, and for a long time to come. The manuscript for this book was a semi-finalist in the 2010 Amateur Breakthrough Novel Competition