(I had that problem too with Anthony Breznican’s Brutal Youth.) Some of the satiric touches here went quite OTT for me. The trouble with a really bad school (whether an inner-city public school with drug dealers in the corridors & bullies beating the shit out of you for your lunch money or a posh prep school with drug dealers in the dormitories & bullies beating the shit out of you for the sheer fun of it) is that they are comic in satiric fiction, tho in realistic fiction they’re tragic, which sometimes leaves the reader a loss whether to respond with laughter or tears. Frankly, School is pretty bad.” Bellingham is definitely “pretty bad.” Apparently the ISEE test score required for admission is a parent’s signature on a tuition check that’ll be honored by the bank, so it says a lot about how badly Jason managed to screw up his previous establishment that his father has to build Bellingham a new dormitory to get them to take him.

A character in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline & Fall remarks, “We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, & School. If you went to a decent school, you’ll remember the list we kept of where ex-classmates too thick, too crazy, or too criminal to be invited to rejoin us the end of term would probably go next. Unfortunately Amber Dermont failed to combine them well & some of them had gone more than a bit off. Tho’ I found it a great disappointment, The Starboard Sea had all of these proper ingredients. In other words, a typical school term, but tweaked just a bit tighter. What I wanted from this book was clear: a school story like Megan Abbott’s Dare Me, with junior sailing instead of competitive cheerleading, but the same intense concentration on fierce competition, bitter rivalry, high-octane jealous relationships, no-holds-barred tragic readiness to throw fate to the winds, young love, betrayal & death.

Brutal Youth by Anthony Breznican