Hardback published by Gallery Books 20th July 2023
ISBN 9781398522473
It’s 1992.
Like every other seventeen-year-old boy, Joe has one eye on his studies, the other on his social life – smoking, Britpop, girls. He’s looking ahead to a gap year full of travel and adventure before university when his teacher- attractive, mid-thirties – takes an interest in him. It seems like a fantasy come true.
For his final two years at school, he is bound to her, a woman twice his age, in an increasingly tangled web of coercion, sex and lies. Their affair, a product of complex grooming and a shocking abuse of authority, is played out in the corridors of one of Britain’s major private schools, under the noses of people who suspected, even knew, but said nothing.
Thirty years on, this is Joe’s gripping record of the illicit relationship that dominated his adolescence and dictated the course of his life. With a heady dose of nineties nostalgia and the perfectly captured mood of those final months at school, Seventeen charts the enduring legacy of deceit and the indelibility of decisions made at seventeen.
MY REVIEW
My biggest shout out at the top of my voice. Wow what a read, Seventeen is the best memoir I’ve ever read!
I very highly recommend reading Seventeen, it’s an memoir that you won’t ever be able to forget.
I read and enjoyed every single word of Seventeen memoir written by Joe Gibson, which is written under a pseudonym.
This true story Seventeen, reminded me of an fictional American drama television miniseries, A Teacher starring Nick Robinson, ( from Love Simon) A Teacher is a crime series with an English teacher in her early 30s and her 17 year old student.
In the Seventeen Memoir, at the age of sixteen in September 1991, Joe Gibson starts a public school, he has two best friends Nick and Ant, that he hangs around with, sharing everything about girls, like boys do.
This is until Miss P at school, needs help from Joe taking boxes to her car, and then onto her flat, with Joe helping taking the boxes up into her flat. This is the start of Miss P starting a grooming illicit affair with her student, Joe Gibson, but it has to remain a big secret.
Joe should be spending time with his friends more, but when he does, Miss P known as Ali, doesn’t hide her feelings with jealousy.
Miss P is an adult she wants Joe to go on holiday with her to Spain, where they have sex, and she has thought up a plan to not make anyone suspicious. She also has other plans for Joe to divert any suspicion away from them.
It’s a shame Miss P groomed Joe to spend so much time with her having an illicit sexual relationship, as Joe had big plans with revision, mock exams, scholarship to get into Oxford.
The things that Miss P gets Joe to do are really quite unforgivable.
But in 1992 Joe’s abuser could not have been prosecuted.
It wasn’t until the Sexual Offences ( Amendment ) Act 200 ( an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom) that it became illegal for a teacher to have sexual relations with any pupils under the age of eighteen, even if the relationship was consensual.
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