Teen Sleuth Haunted Library

Ah, the English boarding school of fiction! Happy schoolgirls scrambling over undulating green hills and hedgerows to classrooms in former manors or castles. Twins, unruly tomboys, sheltered small town bumpkins, spoilt brats, mysterious foreign exchange girls, sexually ambiguous jocks who go by “Billie”, “Bobby” or “Al”, scatterbrained math geniuses, jolly horse-crazed gals, overly invested language teachers no nonsense lacrosse coaches with super short hair… French lessons and proper sports like lacrosse and cricket, great gymnasiums with ropes and vaulting horses, gymslips and pinafores and tunics with black velvet ties…kitchen raids, secret languages, picnics and pillow fights. For those of us who went to regular school (Quaker school no less), English boarding schools seemed quintessentially romantic. Sent to countryside edens, away from parents and siblings and into the arms of motherly yet non meddling mistresses – freed from the shackles of real parents, but without the ennui of actual dead parents – and into a cloistered, feminine world with rituals, codes and bells and no-nonsense mistresses to impose order and safety.  In boarding school, small incidents have more intensity, and overwrought friendship dramas grow from the passionate and rebellious teenage soul that longs to be accepted everywhere and deep, forever friendships form, verging on the romantic. Of course there is always the snoot, the troublemaker, the strict mistress, but it always sorts itself out, even if it means sometimes “getting your corners knocked off”. Because above all, you are a community. You are recognized for your individuality but you’re part of a herd. You belong.

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