‘Practice’ by Rosalind Brown       (2024) – 202 pages

As often it seems to occur in college, our female Oxford student Annabel has put off her assignment, writing an essay about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, until the Sunday the day before it is due. ‘Practice’ is set in the winter of 2009.

“Four hundred years later, she keeps on reading.”

Annabel enjoys the sonnets, both those written to the young man, the Fair Youth, and those written to the Dark Lady. She likes “spending time with these poems: which are better company than people, they take your shape willingly, but still lightly, like a duvet does”.

She starts the day with good intentions about writing her essay. She reads some of the sonnets at random. She compiles a list of words to describe the Sonnets: plaintive, domineering, splintering, exhilarating, rough, bossy, bitter.

“She lets them work on her mind, entering wholeheartedly into the spirit of them, hardly writing anything down: just reading.”

But there are distractions. Sometimes, while we are reading, we think about everything except about what we are reading.

Even before lunch, she decides that “a walk might invigorate her”. During her walk around the Oxford campus, she considers the man she has been seeing. He is a friend of her mother’s; he is 36, Annabel is 20. She hasn’t told her mother that she has been seeing him yet. Should she drop him or continue going out with him?

By the time she gets back over an hour has passed on her walk, and it is time for lunch.

Later as the day lumbers on and she has yet to begin her essay, Annabel considers grabbing at straws:

“Could she, she flickers a smile, could she provocatively write an essay about her own failure to write an essay. Would the tutorial eyebrows raise.”

She drops that idea, but now it is early evening and she still hasn’t written anything.

This is a novel about a college student, a young woman, spending a day trying to write an essay as an assignment. If you were expecting a detailed analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets, you would be disappointed. However it does vividly capture this bright young woman’s somewhat humorous yet exasperating struggle to write her essay.

Grade:    A