A Proper Education for Girls

British novelist diRollo's mixed debut, set in 1850s England and colonial India, tells the story of twin sisters Alice and Lilian Talbot, who were born into an aristocratic but eccentric English family and raised by their widowed father among his collected curiosities and creepy acquaintances. One of those acquaintances, closet pornographer Dr. Cattermole, assists the Talbots in their curatorial obsessions. Their quiet existence is thrown into upheaval when Lilian is married off against her will to a missionary and forced to move to India with him. The sisters struggle and rebel against their suffocating situations—Lilian slogging through the subcontinent, Alice under the cruel and exploitative manipulations of Dr. Cattermole—until Lilian sends her sister a coded letter and a photograph, setting events in motion to bring them together. The vivid and sometimes graphic details of Victorian-era obsessions are intriguing, though the prose quality is spotty and the dialogue is often wooden (“ 'Release me!' cried Alice. 'You are committing a grave and punishable crime to hold me in this way' ”). The premise is wonderful, but the execution doesn't do it justice. (Apr.)