This year, I spent most of my time teaching and studying, so for Davida’s Eight Candle Book Tag, I chose to highlight eight books set in schools. Unranked, because I enjoy different books for different moods. Instead, I tried to tell you a little about what I liked in each one.

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is a high-school story that takes teenage relationships and pain seriously, leading to compelling characters and situations. Just like in life, the students who are caught, injured, or punished after general teenage antics didn’t do anything worse than their classmates who escaped without consequences.  Amid the well-meaning young teachers, the indifferent lifers teaching towards retirement, and the rest of the school staff, is one predatory teacher. Random elements lead to wide-ranging consequences, making the story feel realistic and, yes, dangerous.

Adequate Yearly Progress tells the story of one year in a typical high school. Some parts are unpleasantly familiar to anyone who’s ever taught, no, to anyone who’s ever had annoying colleagues. Naturally, one hyperorganized, authority-obsessed teacher, with little to no interest in students, is rewarded for her rule-following. A naive young teacher tries to apply what she’s learned in ed school, with predictably awkward results.  

In The Cheerleaders, the town of Sunnybrook has no cheerleaders. Five years ago, they were all killed, in different ways but in a very short time period. Now, the high school wants to memorialize the lost girls, but that’s bringing up a lot of deeply-held secrets. This is a twisty drama with high-school girls and high-school friendships at the forefront.

For fans of this novel, One of Us Is Lying is another twisty high-school page-turner with layers of secrets. Like a much darker Breakfast Club, classmates with nothing in common meet in detention, but instead of a cute 80s locker montage, they’re witnesses to a murder.  Rotating POV is not always my favorite, but it works here, as several narrators piece together their memories of that day, what lead up to it, and what came after.

Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep is one of my favorites in the whole school genre. Awkward, midwestern Lee Fiora applies to an East Coast prep academy, and discovers an entirely new society. She spends most of her time watching and trying not to be noticed, making this both a prep school manners novel and an awkward coming-of-age story  Sittenfeld’s The Man of My Dreams is not a sequel, but nervous Hannah feels like a college-age extension of Lee Fiora. 

Now, if Prep’s protag was an awkward teacher lost at an upper-class prep school and not an awkward student lost at an upper class prep school, you’d have Corinne Sullivan’s Indecent. When Imogene Abney lands a teaching position at the all-boys prep academy, she’s delighted. She’s always been charmed by prep school life, despite a solidly working-class background. But her inexperience with teaching, teenage boys, and privilege in general leads to trouble. There is a deeply cringey relationship here (but it’s impossible to look away), when Imogene falls in an all-consuming first love. 

Although the story is more focused on getting in than actually attending school, The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger, is a story of hyper-competitive parents in a thinly veiled Denver suburb. When a new, special school for even-more-gifted students opens, the pressure to test well, present well, network well, and get into a the gifted school reveals class pressures and marital secrets. For fans for this one, The Admissions, by Meg Mitchell Moore, focuses on hyper-competitive college admissions and the status of a Harvard diploma.

Finally, Academy Girls blends the student life with the teaching experience. Divorced and broke, Jane Milton returns to her old high school as a teacher and dorm mother. She recalls her high school friendships and secrets, and begins to investigate both an old campus mystery and a strange new one, when a current student begins to hand in creative writing assignments that resemble her own experiences.  The two stories unfold together.