“No one in Wuthering Heights is nice. Good, bad, mad, but no nice.” Emily Brontë is the role model for teenage Fiona, a passionate artist growing up in a Glasgow working-class family. Anguished about the death of her mother, furious at her father (“I wish it was you that died”), trying to care for her younger siblings, she hitches up with Jas, a gorgeous Sikh guy, though they don’t have sex; then she betrays him with his brother, but then he loves her gay older brother. Fortunately there are no preachy parallels with her Brontë model. The resolution gets a bit heavy, but the fights are fun, and her turmoil grabs the reader. Its wicked, sad, and open: “I’d no idea whether he thought I didna want to or if he didna want to or what.” Caught by the “not nice” drama of love and grief in family, friends, sex, and art, readers will go along with the contemporary Glasgow narrative. And not only Brontë fans. The coming-of-age story is universal. --Hazel Rochman
