Class Trip

This is a spooky little book about childhood, the banality of school trips, nightmares, confusion and the apparent strangeness of the adult world in which this odd story is set. You have to read this book carefully as it is quite complex but it draws you in, and you are soon wondering if Nicholas' father is ever going to come back with his case, will the missing local boy ever be found alive and has Nicholas' father somehow been involved in his disappearence and why has the toughest and most respected boy on the school trip taken Nicholas, obviously a wimp in the first degree under his wing? Slowly and almost painfully these questions are answered and like Nicholas, the not quite likable child hero, (he is sometimes endearing though) you are forced to confront a terrible truth and know sometimes forgiveness is not possible either in the adult or world of children...

First of all, let me state that the reviewer below who said this book relies on graphic violence is flat out incorrect. There is no graphic violence described!This slim novel vividly explores the psychological terror of Nicholas, a sheltered adolescent who is sent to a two-week ski-camp. He is obviously the wimpy outsider, and every encounter with classmates or adults becomes an intense mental test, in which the wrong word could prove fatal. Carerre's understated prose masterfully depicts the terror experienced by an over-imaginative child on his own for the first time, but the suspense really develops when a child from the village near the ski-camp goes missing and is found brutally murdered. While astute readers will easily foresee the conclusion from earlier hints, the inevitable endgame is both gripping and crushing. Someone else compared the book's tone to that of the excellent Dutch film "Spoorloss" (aka "The Vanishing"--not the American remake). That's an apt comparison, although this book has also been made into a movie as "La Classe de neige."

for such a short book, carrere seems to have packed everything into that he could. this book is very suspensful. nicholas, the main char, has a very active imagination and reads way too much horror, and carrere uses that to build the tension, suspense and dread as the story reaches its climax. the author did an excellent job telling the story from a child's point of view. there is no overt sex in the story, but throughout you get a hint of homoeroticism.

Class Trip is an absolutely stunning book - a very tightly written book with more suspense than The Name of the Bullfighter which is itself a great book. An excellent psychological portrayal of middle school age view of the world, of classmates and of "Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew" children's mysteries.