Iâm an award-winning author of two novels, the most recent of which, The Nine, is set on a fictional New England boarding school campus. Although a secret societyâs antics and a scandal on campus keeps readers turning the page, at the heart of the novel is the evolution of a mother-son relationship. Even before my three children began considering boarding schools, I was a fan of the campus novel. Think classics like A Separate Peace or Catcher in the Rye. My fascination surrounding these little microcosmsâtheir ideals, how they self-govern, who holds powerâonly increased after experiencing their weird and wily ways as a mother.
This novelâs brilliance and unique female perspective wedged its way into my sensibility as a writer, stoking my desire to tell stories from unexpected voices. Set on a small Massachusetts campus and told from the perspective of a teenage girl who leaves her family behind in Indiana, Prep not only sends you back into the angst of adolescence but is an indoctrination into boarding school rites and rituals. Young Lee Fiora, a scholarship student with outsider status, spends three years earning respect, academically and socially, at the school. There is a price, however, and the saddest of those is a distancing from her family. I love this bookâs exploration of class and teenage ambition, what teenage girls do for popularity, and the inept manner in which adults try to participate. Plus, itâs Curtis Sittenfeldâs debut novel!
An insightful, achingly funny coming-of-age story as well as a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.
Lee Fiora is an intelligent, observant fourteen-year-old when her father drops her off in front of her dorm at the prestigious Ault School in Massachusetts. She leaves her animated, affectionate family in South Bend, Indiana, at least in part because of the boarding schoolâs glossy brochure, in which boys in sweaters chat in front of old brick buildings, girls in kilts hold lacrosse sticks on pristinely mown athletic fields, and everyone sings hymns in chapel.âŚ
Speaking of outsiders, Around Harvard Square follows a superstar student-athlete from small-town USA who assumes heâs made it big when heâs admitted to Harvard University. However, as a young, Black man, Tosh Livingston soon discovers the ways in which he does not belong and finds that admissions committees arenât the only gatekeepers. This novel really digs deep into issues of race and class, insiders and outsiders. And while the topics feel timely, they are also timelessânot only in the world at large but also in that microcosm, the campus. There have always been those who are kept out and always those with special access, such as legacies and athletes. The protagonist in this novel also comes up against a secret society, an underground facet of campus life and the epitome of exclusivity, which really set my own creative juices in motion. Funny and fast-paced, this novel epitomizes a protagonistâs struggle to learn the secret handshake.
Race, class, and hormones combine and combust when a Harvard freshman and his two friends attempt to join the staff of the Harpoon, the school's iconic humor magazine.
Around Harvard Square is the winner of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work (Youth/Teens)!
Around Harvard Square has been named a 2020 Honor Book by the Paterson Prize for Books for Young People
"A smart, satirical novel about surviving the racial and cultural tensions ratcheted up in the elite Harvard hothouse. Farley has created a marvelously engaging and diverse set of characters, at the center of which is a nerdyâŚ
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine MariaâŚ
Another secret society lies at the heart of Plain Bad Heroines, a novel I love for its mix of moody darkness and incisive wit. Picture Brookhants, a long-abandoned boarding school for girls in Little Compton, Rhode Island, haunted by the legends of obsessions and secret rites and yes, death. The book weaves together two narratives: one tracing the development of deep friendships, jealousies, and love triangles at Brookharts in the early 1900s, the other picking up a century later as a Hollywood film crew travels to the school to make a movie inspired by its macabre history.
New England old-money types come face to face with A-list celebrities and social media influencersâand have more in common than you would think. While I enjoyed this bookâs characters and setting immensely, I would have read Plain Bad Heroines for the language alone. Full of punch and wit, it is a courageous piece of writing, a six-hundred-word novel, written with a nod to the gothic, harkening Mary Shelley, Emily BrontĂŤ, and George Eliot in its omniscient voice and unabashedly addressing the reader throughout. Who canât applaud an author like Emily M. Danforth for taking all that on!
'It's a terrible story and one way to tell it is this: two girls in love and a fog of wasps cursed the place forever after...'
BROOKHANTS SCHOOL FOR GIRLS: Infamous site of a series of tragic deaths over a hundred years ago. Soon to be the subject of a controversial horror movie about the rumoured 'Brookhants curse':âŚ
One of Anita Shreveâs lesser-known novels, I love Testimony for the contemporary conundrum it introduces. No more sweeping things under the rug; administrations must deal with transgressions in a public manner. In Testimony, students at another New England boarding school behave badly, capturing a lewd act on film. No matter how you code it, a crime has been committed, and the school must deal with it.
While the novel explores multiple points of view, the perspective of the accused studentâs mother had the greatest effect on me: âYou stand up⌠You get into your car and back out of your driveway and make the turn onto the street and immediately a new set of pictures darts in front of you like small boys on bicycles. Rob in a helmet on a skateboard⌠A boy with a bad haircut holding up his Cub Scout handbookâŚâ The second-person technique wonderfully conveys a worried motherâs out-of-body experience as she rushes to be by her childâs side, a child she is furious with, but loves nonetheless.
At a New England boarding school, a sex scandal is about to break. Even more shocking than the sexual acts themselves is the fact that they were caught on videotape. A Pandora's box of revelations, the tape triggers a chorus of voices -- those of the men, women, teenagers, and parents involved in the scandal -- that details the ways in which lives can be derailed or destroyed in one foolish moment.
Writing with a pace and intensity surpassing even her own greatest work, Anita Shreve delivers in Testimony a gripping emotional drama with the impact of a thriller. NoâŚ
This book is a literary historical novel. It is set in Britain immediately after World War II, when people â gay, straight, young, and old - are struggling to get back on track with their lives, including their love lives. Because of the turmoil of the times, the number ofâŚ
A painful examination of all thatâs at stake when kids make bad decisions, This Beautiful Life made me reflect on the pressure contemporary kids feel to be beyond reproach while growing up amid the instant connectivity and permanent consequences of the internet age. Like Testimony, Schulmanâs novel begins with a video, this time one whose ramifications are amplified and complicated as it goes viral in a matter of hours.
A gripping early scene dramatizes the split second when fifteen-year-old Jake Bergamot makes the fateful choice to forward a video heâs received to a friend. The scandal that ensues threatens not only Jake, but his entire familyâs âbeautiful life.â Rather than a boarding school, this novel is set at an elite Manhattan private school where the social strata among parents are even more painfully felt. As the story unfolds, this book takes readers even deeper into the momâs headâa delightful place where wit and satire know no boundsâand explores the maternal experience that what happens to our children, happens to us as well.
"ThisBeautiful Life is a gripping, potent and blisteringly well-written story offamily, dilemma, and consequence. . . . I read this book with white-knuckledurgency, and I finished it in tears. Helen Schulman is an absolutely brilliantnovelist." âElizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love
Theevents of a single night shatter one familyâs sense of security and identity inthis provocative and deeply affecting domestic drama from Helen Schulman, theacclaimed author of A Day at the Beach and Out of Time. In thetradition of Lionel Shriver, Sue Miller, and Laura Moriarty, Schulman crafts abrilliantly observed portrait of parenting and modern life, cunningly exploringour mostâŚ
When well-meaning helicopter mom Hannah Webber enrolls her brilliant son and the center of her world, Sam, into the boarding school of her dreams, neither of them is prepared for what awaits: an illicit underworld where decades of privileged conspiracy threaten not only Sam but also their fragile family.
Both a coming-of-age novel and a portrait of an evolving mother-son relationship, The Nine is the story of a young man who chooses to expose a corrupt world operating under its own set of rulesâeven if it means jeopardizing his motherâs hopes and dreams.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. The first in a charming, joyful crime series set in 1920s Bangalore, featuring sari-wearing detective Kaveri and her husband Ramu.
When clever, headstrong Kaveri moves to Bangalore to marry handsome young doctor Ramu, she's resigned herself to a quiet life. ButâŚ