School Days

New notebooks, pens and pencils.  Ah, the first weeks of school, there’s nothing else quite like them.  And while grownups don’t necessarily get the same experience in the fall that we did when we were kids, memories of school years past are no further away than a shelf here at the library.  For little taste of those days gone by, here are a few titles to take you back.

Miss Timmins’ School for Girls, by Nayana Currimbhoy.  Set in the 1970s, in the hills of western India, this story of youth and murder at a British boarding school follows Charu, shy and sheltered teacher of Shakespeare, as she grows up and is introduced to a world outside of her family.  When a body is found in a monsoon one night, Charu is implicated in the crime, and her real education begins.  Atmospheric and surprisingly funny, this is a school story you won’t soon forget.

Daughters of the Revolution, by Carolyn Cooke.  It’s 1968, and  the prestigious Goode School in the town of Cape Wilde has fallen on hard times.  It is run by its aging, philandering headmaster, Goddard Byrd, known to both his friends and his enemies as God.  God has confidently promised coeducation “over my dead body.” And then, through a clerical error, the Goode School admits its first female student: Carole Faust, a brilliant, intractable fifteen-year-old black girl.  What does it mean to be the First Girl?  For a slim book, this packs an enormous punch.

Big Girl Small, by Rachel DeWoskin.  In a voice as raw and darkly funny as any I’ve ever come across, narrator Judy Lohden comes to tell readers just how, in a world that values the creative and simultaneously shuns the different, she came to be hiding in a seedy motel room instead of singing onstage at her local performing arts high school.  For everyone who ever felt like an outsider in high school; FYI, DeWoskin has even been compared to John Hughes. 

See you next week, with tasty mysteries you can really sink your teeth into!