Again, Truepenny asks for book recommendations

[truepenny]

A conversation on someone else's LJ reminded me of a long-standing curiosity. And now that, hey, I have people around who are extraordinarily well-read, I thought I'd pose the question.

Books about boarding schools that get it right.

There's a long post I made back in December about a number of reasons why Diana Wynne Jones's Witch Week is a better res (Latin for "thing"--I can't think of a word for what I want) than the Harry Potter books. One of those reasons is that Rowling's vision of what boarding school is like doesn't ring true, even to an American reader such as myself. But, when I grumble, Someone ought to write a book that does this properly, I can't put my money where my mouth is, because I don't actually know what I'm talking about. I can just tell a dreamy delusion when I see one. So I'm interested in finding books that achieve a more accurate representation.

Obviously, if the book is sf/f/h, that's a big bonus, but for the purposes of this book-quest, it's the boarding-school-ness I'm looking for. All suggestions welcome and appreciated!

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

For reasons which I never fully understood, we had a bunch of Enid Blyton's books--Malory Towers and the St. Claire books. I read 'em. Look back on them with a sense of curdlement. I think Rowling read 'em, too. Never read Angela Brazil, although I am relieved to learn for certain that she really exists, and is not just a figment of DWJ's imagination (in The Lives of Christopher Chant--I want a teenage Millie and Christopher story, so we can learn how Millie really fared in boarding school).

Shall hunt down the others.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Rowling read them. They were ubiquitous, but I can tell she read them.

I think the reason Harry Potter -- I've only read the first three -- is so very much a phenomenon is that boarding school stories used to be one of the major ingredients of children's reading, but the old ones are now so totally politically impossible because they are snobbish and sexist and racist and no parent can take their values seriously, and modern ones with good values lack some of the essentials of what made Blyton and Brazil and Frank Harris and so on popular. Zorinth, at nine when I thought of this and asked him, hadn't read any school stories except Potter and Witch Week. So Potter coming along into this gap with the snobbery and everything just the same, except directed at Muggles rather than people with different skin colour/less money, makes nobody uncomfortable, while filling the delightful wish fulfilment niche for under elevens. (When Zorinth was nine, he and all his good friends genuinely expected to be invited to Hogwarts at eleven. By the time they were eleven they'd grown out of this, naturally.) Combined with perfectly good stories, archetypal characters and very clear incluing, no wonder everyone loves them.

As for Malory Towers, the main characters graduated and went to St. Andrews in 1967. If anyone would like to write a brief satire of those particular girls discovering sex, drugs, rock and roll, and a world with shades of grey in it, I think it would be acceptable satire.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I think what you say about Harry Potter is very true. (Also one of the things that is starting to drive me batshit about the books, but if I'm going to rant about that, I'll do it in a separate post.) Also, I think that Rowling, like Blyton, validates clique-ish-ness by not admitting that's what her heroes do. Harry, Ron, and Hermione ARE A CLIQUE, GODAMMIT, just as much as Malfoy, Crabbe, and Goyle. Just ask Neville Longbottom. But from inside a clique, it doesn't look like a clique, and since Blyton and Rowling absolutely eschew any hint of distancing from their protagonist's valuations, you have to read against the text to see what's going on. And even though we all know cliques are bad, I think we do--especially at that age--want to be a part of one. Rowling's version of boarding school also leaves out the petty in-fighting that even Blyton put in.

I'm trying to get the two concepts, Malory Towers and sex, drugs, & rock'n'roll, into the same frame of reference, and I just can't do it. Except to think that here, at long last, would be Gwendolyn's chance to one-up everybody else; she had to get a job, she's been out in the world, she would know the ropes. Somehow I can see Gwendolyn with a cigarette (a la Catherine Zeta Jones in Chicago, since I just saw that recently), smirking as Darryl and Sally cough and sputter.

My god, Malfoy is so Gwendolyn. I wonder if he's got a similar Great Come-uppance waiting for him.