Take a Girl Like You

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Take a Girl Like You is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis. The narrative follows the progress of twenty-year-old Jenny Bunn, who has moved from her family home in the North of England to a small town not far from London to teach primary school children. Jenny is a 'traditional' Northern working-class girl whose dusky beauty strikes people as being at odds with the old-fashioned values she has gained from her upbringing, not least the conviction of 'no sex before marriage'. A central thread of the novel concerns the frustrations of the morally dubious Patrick Standish, a 30-year-old teacher at the local grammar school/public school and his attempts to, by hook or by crook, accomplish the seduction of Jenny; all this against a backdrop of Jenny's new teaching job and Patrick's work activities and his leisure time with flatmate and colleague Graham and their new acquaintance, the well-off and somewhat older man-about-town Julian Ormerod.