THE THOROUGHBREDS

Back to school, Hilderbrand fans: The promised sequel to The Academy (2025) is here.

With her daughter, Cunningham, again riding shotgun, the beloved beach-novel queen consolidates her conquest of boarding school fiction with this follow-up set in academic year 2026-27 at Tiffin Academy, the posh Western Massachusetts campus introduced in the previous volume. Joining a list of distinguished predecessors the students are reading in Boarding School Lit (books by Tobias Wolff, Rebecca Makkai, Curtis Sittenfeld, and Martha Southgate are among those mentioned), the novel flits among the perspectives of key members of the new senior class (aka “sixth formers”), head of school Audre Robinson and members of her faculty, and “Tiffin Talks,” a first-person-plural narrator representing the student body as a whole. Hilderbrand’s faithful readers will recognize the latter device from the Nantucket novels, and it works just as cleverly here. New on the roster this year are the appallingly rich and vapid day student Pippa Sacks, who arrives weeks after summiting Kilimanjaro, and a scholarship dreamboat from Queens, Liam Donovan, whose mother is dating the president of the board of directors, billionaire Jesse Eastman. His son, Andrew Eastman, known as East, is an unrepentant bad boy whose continued presence at school despite mind-boggling disciplinary infractions is the result of a secret deal between his father and Audre. The influence of East’s ongoing romance with brainiac outsider Charley Hicks begins to set him on a new path this year. Beloved quarterback Dub Austin will shake up the campus with a secret revealed in his senior speech, and on his computer, he’s still got the suicide note that his late girlfriend, Cinnamon Peters, asked him to save until the morning of graduation. Don’t worry, kids, it’s finally going to be opened, and in the meantime a dazzling array of juicy subplots will be juggled as only Hilderbrand can.

The campus series scratches this author’s proprietary itch as effectively as the island set did. We’ll follow her anywhere.