The Following Girls by Louise Levene - book review: 'The naughty schoolgirl's guide to feminism'

It is 1975 at the Mildred Fawcett girls' school. Chins are "orange with spot concealer", knitted socks and navy regulation sports knickers are giving Mary Quant a run for her money, and the sweet and sour mix of body spray and body odour only just masks the reek of forbidden fags. The names of those facing detention ("The following girls…") used to be read out in assembly, but "admiring giggles as the same naughty names were recited week after week" put a stop to this. One of the most notorious "heroines of the wrong sort of school story" is 15-year-old Amanda Barker.

Her home life isn't a bed of roses either. Her mother Patsy read The Second Sex then "made a bolt for it" when Amanda was three and a half. After which, details such as the fact she once spent "the entire quarter's housekeeping money on paying a local firm to construct a 'menstrual hut' in the petitioner's vegetable garden" won Mr Barker sole custody of his daughter. Patsy still sends Christmas gifts. These included Meccano and fishing rods when Amanda was small, but more recently Patsy has upped the game: "The Female Eunuch, a speculum, a pocket make-up mirror and a Roneoed leaflet on where to find your cervix (north of the gusset and you couldn't miss it apparently)"; a badge saying "The Future is Female"; The Bell Jar and Matriarchy: Myths of Motherhood (folded inside of which is a leaflet from the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell).

Counterbalancing these annual missives from the feminist underground are the school careers room literature – "Rosemary Takes to Teaching; Pauline Becomes a Hairdresser and A Career for Women in Industry? (the question mark said it all)" – and Amanda's stepmother, Pam, with her tottering stacked heels and Formica "dream kitchen" with its grapefruit spoons, "a special flowerpot contraption just for cooking chicken, stainless steel dishes just for avocados, toy bolts that held on to your sweetcorn and a mad gadget with a butter curler at one end and a melon baller at the other".

Amanda is teetering on the edge of expulsion when Julia Smith, sports prefect and seemingly model student, takes the younger girl under her wing. But Julia, it transpires, is not as squeaky-clean as she pretends to be.

Although lacking the seriousness or drama to warrant the Nineteen Eighty-Four meets The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie buzz that precedes it, The Following Girls is a clever and extremely entertaining study of teenage claustrophobia.