Spell the Month in Books is hosted by Jana at Reviews from the Stacks. This month’s theme is back to school. These are books that are set in schools or feature main characters who are students. There were books I loved that are set in high school, college or graduate schools.
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Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli: I finally read this novel about Simon, a gay teenager who’s falling in love with a boy online and is being blackmailed by another boy at his school. When he comes out, he wants it to be on his own terms, and he’s worried about his friend being outed as well.
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Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng: This is the story about the death of a sixteen year old girl in an Ohio suburb in 1977. It’s also a story about her parents, James and Marilyn. In 1955, Marilyn enrolled at Radcliffe and wanted to be a doctor. She pursued that dream until she met James, a professor, and then the dream got put on hold. So she pours her dreams into Lydia.
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The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo: Xiomara, a teen from a Dominican family living in the Bronx, loves to write poetry and much of this book is told in verse through her journal. Xio wants to join a poetry club at school and even perform in poetry slams, but she’s required to be at confirmation classes instead by her oppressive mother. Xio is exploring a forbidden first love and her troubled relationship with Catholicism. She also has a twin brother she loves, but worries they are growing apart.
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Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi: Gifty is conducting neurological research at Stanford University. She comes from Ghanaian parents, and one of the first things we learn about Gifty is that her family used to be four people, and then it was three, and now it’s only two. All she has left is her mother, and her mother is suffering a severe mental crisis and needs her care. As the title suggests, Gyasi focuses on Gifty’s faith, as Gifty struggles to believe in a higher power after enduring so many hardships, and she also struggles to align science and religion.
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Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett: I loved this book about an introverted Cambridge University professor who travels to a northern Scandinavian village to research faerie lore.
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My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell: This was a tough read but a very moving one. It’s the story of Vanessa, a fifteen year old in a boarding school in Maine who has a sexual relationship with her English teacher. Years later, when other victims come forward and they look to her for support, she doesn’t know how to respond, because she doesn’t know how she sees herself. This is her story, told over 17 years.
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Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore: I love this series of historical romances about suffragists at Oxford University, and this first one is still one of my favorites. Annabelle Archer, the brilliant but destitute daughter of a country vicar, enrolls as part of the first cohort of female students at the University. In return for her scholarship, she must support the rising women’s suffrage movement, which means recruiting men of influence to the cause.
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Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell: I read this book quite a while ago, but I remember it being a beautiful story about two teenagers who meet on a school bus. Park is half-Korean, half-Irish, in a Midwestern town, where he’s popular enough to get by but still doesn’t feel like one of the crowd. Eleanor has big red curly hair, dresses weird, and is described as overweight. She lives with an abusive stepfather and shares a room with her four young siblings. Life at home is miserable and life at school isn’t any better – except for the short time she spends sitting next to Park on the bus each day.
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Real Life by Brandon Taylor: This is a book that stayed with me long after I put it down.I keep thinking about how moving this book was for a debut novel, and how beautifully written. It’s about a late-summer weekend in the life of Wallace, a young black gay man from Alabama, who is a biomedical researcher at a midwestern university. Wallace is struggling to find his place at the school and with his fellow students, who are mostly white.
Please see Reviews from the Stacks for more Spell the Month posts. These are 9 books I loved about students in high school and college. Have you read any of these books, or do you have other suggestions?