The Amber Fury

by Natalie Haynes

When you open up, who will you let in?

When Alex Morris loses her fiancé in dreadful circumstances, she moves from London to Edinburgh to make a break with the past. Alex takes a job at a Pupil Referral Unit, which accepts the students excluded from other schools in the city. These are troubled, difficult kids and Alex is terrified of what she's taken on.

There is one class - a group of five teenagers - who intimidate Alex and every other teacher on The Unit. But with the help of the Greek tragedies she teaches, Alex gradually develops a rapport with them. Finding them enthralled by tales of cruel fate and bloody revenge, she even begins to worry that they are taking her lessons to heart, and that a whole new tragedy is being performed, right in front of her...

• ISBN10: 1782392750
• ISBN13: 9781782392750
• Publish Date: 6 March 2014 (first published 1 February 2014)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 10 August 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Imprint: Corvus
• Edition: Main
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[brokentune]

We’re all responsible for our actions, and that includes me. In retrospect, I did everything wrong, almost from the moment I arrived in Edinburgh. I was weak, thoughtless and self-centred. I believed I was helping them, or at least I persuaded myself that I was. But the undeniable truth is that if I had made even the slightest effort to look outwards at these children, instead of inwards, I could have changed everything that happened. No-one was destined to die at this point.

Wow. Now, this book was not perfect and there are some aspects that made no sense, such as why an inexperienced teacher would be allowed to teach drama to teenagers with a history of violence without being given either their case files/histories or any training whatsoever on how to deal with certain behaviours or ensure security, is clearly beyond me. Or that the class never actually read any texts in class, which was really weird.

HOWEVER, this book made up for this in many other aspects.
The plot was fresh to me. I could not predict how this was going to go. The characters were fully fleshed out, and the characters' inner conflicts were really well portrayed.

What I loved best, tho, was that this story was not a re-telling of a Greek classic as the books blurb may have suggested. Instead, Haynes used the plot of Alex, a theatre director, teaching juvenile delinquents about Greek drama as a way to ask whether certain themes and issues addressed in Greek drama are still relevant today and how they would be assessed today.

I thought this book was, despite its light tone of voice, really quite complex and really though-provoking, and all the while Haynes built up a plot that would climax in something that we, as the reader, know is going to happen, but we don't know what this is and when it will occur.

The Amber Fury was smart and thrilling and I loved it. I certainly also want to read Haynes' other books.

Even if you have no control over your life, you should live like you have a choice.