Ten of the best boarding school books

James Browning is a spokesman and chief strategist for Common Cause, a government watchdog group. He attended Brown University and has an M.A from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. His new novel is The Fracking King.

One of the author's ten best boarding school books, as shared at Publishers Weekly:

Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld

Lee “Flea” Fiora is an outsider at Ault Academy—a Hoosier who knows that leaving her old school where classes were like a private conversation between her and the teacher may have been an “enormous error.” Yet for all Ault’s snobbery and slights from teachers, upperclassmen, and people who are supposed to be her friends, the person at Ault who is hardest on Lee is Lee herself, and her self-knowledge leads to the great insight that the real pain of high school comes from trying to get people to love you before you feel loveable.

Read about another entry on the list.

Also see Robin Stevens's top ten boarding school stories.

--Marshal Zeringue