Bilgewater - Jane Gardam

''One of the funniest, most entertaining, most unusual stories about young love'' Evening Standard Marigold Green calls herself ''hideous, quaint and barmy''. Other people calle her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill''s daughter. Growing up motherless in a boys'' school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity. Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence ''A striking story'' Times Literary Supplement