Dorm Days: Boarding School and College Life

In the evocative tradition of Donna Tartt's first novel, "The Secret History," comes this accomplished debut of youthful innocence drowned by dark sins. Twenty years ago, Jane Hudson left the Heart Lake School for Girls in the Adirondacks after a terrible tragedy. Now she has returned to the placid, isolated shores of the lakeside school as a Latin teacher, recently separated and hoping to make a fresh start with her young daughter. But ominous messages from the past dredge up forgotten memories that will become a living nightmare.
Since freshmen year, Jane and her two roommates, Lucy Toller and Deirdre Hall, were inseparable-studying the classics, performing school girl rituals on the lake, and sneaking out after curfew to meet Lucy's charismatic brother Matt. However, the last winter before graduation, everything changed. For in tha

When Catherine Morrow is admitted to the Esther Percy School for Girls, it's on the condition that she reform her ways. But that's before the charismatic and beautiful Skye Butterfield chooses Catherine for her best friend, in this chilling portrait of an adolescent seduced into ruin by an unrelenting peer.

"The New Girls" is a resonant, engrossing novel about five girls during their formative prep-school years in the tumultuous mid-sixties. Into their reality of first-class trips to Europe, resort vacations, and deb parties enter the Vietnam War, the women's movement, and the sexual revolution. As the old traditions collide with the new society, the girls lose their innocence, develop a social conscience, and discover their sexuality -- blossoming into women shaped by their turbulent times.

Flannery Culp, a world-weary high school senior, is primed to take on the few remaining obstacles that stand between her and the rest of her life. If only things hadn't gotten out of control and she had stayed away from the absinthe, then she wouldn't be a topic on daytime talk shows or incarcerated.

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Friendship, murder, revenge, and class conflict collide in an upper-crust English school. As a new term gets under way, a number of annoying incidents befall students and faculty, escalating to murder.

In 1939 young Waverley Scott arrives on remote Isadora Island in the Puget Sound. She is to be a student at Temple School -- banished because her features too closely resemble those of her mother's married employer.

The headmistress of this all-girl school, Sophia Westervelt, has a mysterious past and a passion for education. She instills achievement into her students, confident that one day they will have "dinner with the King of Sweden," because they will win the Nobel Prize. Under Sophia's direction, Waverley grows as her own abilities and vision expand. But far away in Europe, nations clash, and even isolated Isadora Island feels the impact.

Sophia struggles to keep Temple School going, though formidable forces combine against her. And in the midst of this turmoil, Waverley experiences love for the first time -- a love so fierce

Kidd is a pioneer in book cover art, but this novel marks his first attempt to write the words between his magnificent covers. It tells the story of one boy's discovery of graphic design in college and his talented and cruel professor. The novel in two semesters follows our narrator through his first year at the ubiquitous State U. In the first semester, he meets Himillsy Dodd, a precociously brilliant fellow art major with a great disdain for art, and takes Introduction to Drawing, which includes such inane exercises as drawing a still life of a large, brown, and dead bird named Renaldo. Then they take graphic design with the enigmatic William Sorbeck, and life changes forever. Sorbeck shines in three dimensions on the page, a living representation of the larger-than-life professor that luckier college students have a chance to know. Thi

A novel of unrest among 16-year-olds in a boy's school at theopening of WorldWar II.

Heather McGowan's widely praised first novel introduces a literary artist of consummate skill, and a narrative voice of astonishing sensitivity and sensuousness. Tracking every mercurial shift of her character's consciousness, the result is dreamy, disquieting, and achingly alive.
Schooling" is a portrait of an adolescent girl, thirteen-year-old Catrine Evans, who following her mother's death is uprooted from her home in America to an English boarding school. There she encounters classmates who sniff glue and engage in arson and instructors who make merciless fun of her accent. She also finds the sympathetic chemistry teacher Mr. Gilbert, who offers Catrine the friendship she so desperately wants-a friendship that gradually takes on sinister and obsessive overtones.

The year is 1985. Brian Jackson, a working-class kid on full scholarship, has started his ?rst term at university. The usual freshman anxiety over ?tting in is compounded by the gap between his own humble origins and the privileged backgrounds of his better-off classmates.
Brian also has a dark secret--a long-held, burning ambition (stoked by his late father) to appear on the wildly popular TV quiz show "University Challenge--and now, ?nally, it seems the dream is about to become reality. He's made the school team, and they've completed the qualifying rounds and are limbering up for their ?rst televised match. (And, what's more, he's fallen head over heels for one of his teammates, the beautiful, brainy, and intimidatingly posh Alice Harbinson.) Life seems perfect and triumph inevitable--but as his world opens up, Brian learns that a

For many college students, Spring Break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the Roach Coach, his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey.
But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try and make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with. And there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor.
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If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory.
JOE COLLEGE is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funn

Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class, this mesmerizing debut, uncannily uniting the trials of a postmodern upbringing with a murder mystery, heralds the arrival of a vibrant new voice in literary fiction.

IN THIS SEQUEL TO "AT THE SHORES, JERRY ENGELS IS NOW Ajunior at Penn State College, living in a rate fraternity, failing the courses in his major, Petroleum and Natural Gas Engineering, and thinking about women, sex, and love. Since losing the rich beautiful and kind Rosalind lngleside in his last year of high school, he has had four girlfriends and slept with dozens of other women, including wild, hard-bitten, and married women he has encountered in the small towns of central Pennsylvania. When the novel opens, he has just lost pat Gaheris, a gorgeous sorority girl, whom he infected with crabs. Soon he begins to pass the time with Anne, an unattractive and inexperienced art student, who suspects she is a lesbian. Enter Elizabeth, Jerry's Freshman Composition teacher. After a chance meeting one weekend at a ski resort, they seem likely t

J.D. Salinger's classic of adolescent angst is now available for the first time in trade paperback. Holden Caulfield, knowing he is to be expelled from school, decides to leave early. He spends three days in New York City and tells the story of what he did and suffered there.

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A perceptive, achingly funny first novel featuring a middle-class Midwestern teenager trying to fit in at an elite East Coast boarding school, "Prep" is also a brilliant dissection of class, race, and gender in a hothouse of adolescent angst and ambition.

In this "bracingly honest look at race, class, and self-acceptance" ("Essence"), a bright, personable young African American from an inner-city New York neighborhood discovers what it's like to be "the only chip in the cookie" at an exclusive New England prep school.

This suspenseful, superbly engaging debut offers a fascinating look at upper-class ambitions as a group of four thrill-seeking Cambridge students commits a daring crime.

Sixteen year olds Maya and Roe form an intense friendship when they find themselves cast as outsiders at an all girls boarding school. Sharing their life stories, and curiosity about the adult world, they wonder how they might become "people" with style and character as opposed to school girls. When they move beyond the enclosed world of the school to experience the city, and relationships with men, both girls test the line between an emerging sense of self and its total disintegration.

This well-written tale of murder at an elite college reminded me of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley and the movie A Simple Plan.
Beth @ Southeast

Wolfe masterfully chronicles college sports, fraternities, keggers, coeds, and sex--all through the eyes of Charlotte Simmons, a bright and beautiful freshman at the fictional Dupont University.

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The author of the genre-defining memoir "This Boy's Life" now gives readers his first novel--at once a celebration of literature and delicate hymn to a lost innocence of American life and art.

Set in a New England boarding school on the cusp of America's entry into World War II, "A Good School" tells the story of a student, a crippled chemistry teacher, and the schoolmaster's young daughter, who falls in love with the most celebrated boy in the class of 1943.