‘Hell Hounds of High School’

by Tony Hobday in Reviews | 0 comments

Author Patricia Marie Budd

In the 2011 semi-biographical Hell Hounds of High School, Canadian author Patricia Marie Budd develops an environment personal to her own experiences as a 19-year veteran Catholic high school English teacher. Written perceivably for young adults, parents and teachers, Hell Hounds is, at best, an intermediate educational tool.

The protagonist in Budd’s second novel is a recovering addict, Mrs. Priscilla Bird; she is a feisty, unequivocal Catholic high school English teacher, whose husband has been instrumental in her survival not only as a recovering addict, but too as an educator. Plus, he’s rid her of using swear words, though the dialogue is riddled with them: “a-hole, f-you, f-in’ b-, jacka-, bulls-,” and so on.

Aside Mrs. Bird in the hallow halls, of what is commonly called H.E.L.L., is a handful of teachers and administrators who spend too much of the book balking the institution, all the while succinctly trashing the students. In fact, an entire chapter (luckily the chapters are short)  is dedicated to a roundtable whine fest about student coddling: students take no responsibility for their actions (there’s a leap). The chapter ends:

“We need to make them understand that they need to do the work,” Wood emphasizes. “We can’t do it for them.”

“You are so right,” Bird concurs. “The fact is, the more we feed education to them with a silver spoon in an attempt to shoe it down their throats, the less we – no, the less they – get in return for our efforts.”

“So what do you suggest we do instead?” Payne asks.

Motioning with her own (plastic) spoon to illustrate, Bird explains, “I don’t know, but one thing is for sure – in order for them to truly learn anything, they have to lift the spoon themselves.”

The student characters summoned by Budd are somewhat mundane and stereotypical; there’s the bad boy, Greg, who is harboring a dark secret; there’s an obese girl whose self-esteem is so low she eats lunch daily under a stairwell; there’s an effeminate boy who everyone thinks is gay (including the teachers); there’s the popular, pretty girl whose piece de resistance is shedding tears to get her way; and there’s the ill-witted jock.

In another chapter’s end, the obese girl, Mary, comes to a rather shoddy revelation after being ridiculed in the classroom. “No, Mom, there are no friends here for me, but I don’t care because I have you!” Mary knows what she has to do now. “Mrs. Bird is right. Those other kids don’t mean anything.” Mary smiles. The other kids pick on her because she lets them, because she is always afraid. Well, she says firmly to herself, I am no longer afraid!

Though Hell Hounds is far from groundbreaking, the character of Mrs. Bird is much more than two-dimensional unlike most of the other characters, and she is uninhibited and entirely likable – an easy flowing testament to the author. These two, Bird determines, are forming a drunken association that may lead to foolish maneuvers on their part. Mrs. Bird motions to Pitts and offers him whispered advice, “Don’t dip your wick in the company ink.”

As an educator, according to Mrs. Bird, the goal is to poop out ‘bright minds.’ And in the end, with a little help from existentialism, a few bright minds are pooped out of H.E.L.L.