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It's #BQT #BookQuestionTime again:
What's the best novel you've ever read that is set in a school?
As always, please feel free to include cover images!
(fwiw this past ninety minutes of incredible responses is simultaneously Stoner erasure)
I feel like I always answer your book questions with the same book, but……Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro.
hey, stick with a winner!
I dunno about best, but favorite?
Just got this because the bookseller said it was their favorite novel!
Great book, very sly, I really enjoyed it
Loved Secret History. Rebecca Makkai’s “I Have Some Questions for You” also v good.
This early P.G. Wodehouse, in the edition I had fifty-odd years ago:
the vintage publication element greatly appreciated here
I remember buying it with my pocket money. The boys look too modern, of course; like sixties boys instead of Edwardian ones.
It's also just one of my favorite novels in general.
My brain keeps shouting: Pamela Dean's TAM LIN.
another one that's new to me!
Ohmygoodness this one is AMAZING!!! forever changed the Tam Lin story for me.
Oh yes! And same vintage: Caroline Stevermer’s A College of Magics.
Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go often returns to my mind…killing me softly, this novel.
Ah—and Murdoch’s The Sandcastle!
I love Gail Carriger's Finishing School series - steampunk spy school in a dirigible!
The audiobooks are great. One even has a song at the end.
Someone should say Witch Week. Has anyone said Witch Week?
Ionicus cover ICONICUS cover more like
This is the one, if you don't count higher education. "It hurts to be burned."
Moby-Dick: "a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard"
I have to say Invisible Man made me terrified of letters of recommendation 😂 He got some of the worst ever!
Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series, although I do feel like I need to give a shout out to Nicholas Nickleby for truly fantastic school related segments
always happy to see Dickens enter the chat
I came for a funny, mean-spirited Harry Potter pastiche and was surprised/delighted by Novik's pivot to an absolutely unsparing metaphor for capitalism.
I liked the time spent on an in-universe explanation for "where are the grown-ups for goodness sakes?" in that one
The answer kept unpacking, too.
One of the few trilogies I've read recently that I didn't come out of saying "meh. Should have been edited down to one book."
It’s demented and cruel but it’s goddamn great
This may be the first book I read that had lesbians. (I was 10.)
Best (only?) golden age detective novel set in a school: Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers
Is this an example of US usage of “school” to mean university? Gaudy Night is set in Oxford University.
To an English eye, “school” will always mean education up to 18 years old. Another Golden Age mystery set in an educational establishment, post-18: Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey.
