Dark Academia

"When the shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic "prep school prophet" (and St. Dunstan's alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at 19, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school's cultic chapel choir:...

2 stars

"This compulsively readable literary debut set in a secluded boarding school explores the intoxicating, destructive relationships between teenage girls."--Provided by publisher.

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 order to keep an eye on her half-sister, Shaylee, Julia Farentino takes a job at an elite boarding school in Oregon known for turning wayward kids around. Julia is suspicious of the school, because she knows of one student who disappeared, and has never been found. Soon she uncovers disturbing information about previous students.

5 stars

"From ... television writer Stephen Lloyd comes a devilishly good debut: a lightning-fast horror/noir mash-up"--

4 stars

"A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past--the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers--needs--to...

"In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a butch antipodean outsider arrives to take up the antiquated role of "matron." Within this landscape of immense privilege, where difference is met with hostility, the matron finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs. S, the headmaster's wife, a woman who is her polar opposite--an...

4.5 stars

Vermont, 1950. There's a place for the girls whom no one wants--the troublemakers, the illegitimate, the ones too smart for their own good. It's called Idlewild Hall, and local legend says the boarding school is haunted. Four roommates bond over their whispered fears, their friendship blossoming--until one of them mysteriously disappears... Vermont, 2014. Twenty years ago, journalist Fiona Sheridan's elder sister's body was found in the overgrown...

"It's already the second week of term when Natasha, the daughter of a Russian oligarch, arrives at a vast English country house for her first day of boarding school. She soon discovers that the headmaster gives special treatment to the skinniest girls, and Tash finds herself thrown into the school's unfamiliar, moneyed world of fierce pecking orders, eating disorders, and Instagram angst. The halls echo with the story of Princess Augusta, the White...

4 stars

Jam Gallahue, fifteen, unable to cope with the loss of her boyfriend Reeve, is sent to a therapeutic boarding school in Vermont, where a journal-writing assignment for an exclusive, mysterious English class transports her to the magical realm of Belzhar, where she and Reeve can be together.