Tuesday, October 3, 2006

The Secret Life of a Boarding School Brat by Amy Gordon

This is a more up-to-date account of a girl at a boarding school. This one, unlike the spate of books I read during the summer, has a publishing date in this century. For an up-to-date book, it has a different focus from most. Sure, there are dead mothers and fathers, divorced parents, deaths of relatives, but, while they are important to the story, they are not the focus of the story. The partial exceptions to this are 1) the death of Lydia's grandmother, which, while it is still a raw wound to her soul, has happened off-stage, so to speak, and 2) the divorce of her parents and the re-marriage of her father. They are important, but largely background to the real story, which revolves around Lydia's adjustment to being in the boarding school where her grandmother went to school many years ago. Both those events set up the reason for Lydia's feeling of estrangement from her compatriots. She is still adjusting to a different family organization and then she gets shipped off to boarding school. She begins wandering through the school at night and soon makes friends with the school's handyman cum night watchman. He sees that she is interested in an old, prominently displayed painting and sets her the challenge of finding out who the people depicted in the painting are. The rest of the story is a kind of mild mystery, with elements of learning to accept people for who they are.

Unfortunately for my interests, there is very little information about how the school is set up and how it functions, as far as academics and extracurriculars go. We find out a little about the way dinners are run - kids are assigned to tables for a certain period of time. The only times I have been in a situation like that as a child - at summer camp - I disliked it. The only time as an adult was at a private school. I really liked it there. I liked how it felt more like a family atmosphere - and how the kids actually ate the food. (This is completely unlike the public schools where I substitute teach. In these schools, well over half of the food served in the school lunches goes untouched into the trash - it is appalling to see the waste.)

At any rate, the book is a comforting read. The mystery isn't earthshattering and should be solvable by kids who are paying attention and the emotional content of the book is satisfying.

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