A well-conceived and well-executed meditation on trust, privacy, and reputation.
A high school deals with a mass faculty doxxing in this debut literary novel.
Clearwater Community High School has been doxxed. The dating profiles, sexts, and nudes of 41 faculty members have just been published by a local gossip website, and the school has unexpectedly collapsed into complete chaos. The material includes a cache of damaging emails sent by popular English teacher Andy Waters; a series of embarrassing texts documenting an ill-fated fling between the gym coach and the physics teacher; and a video of young math teacher Jennifer Watson having sex with the father of one of her students. It falls to Principal Vince Darten—one of the few Black administrators in the affluent White town of Clearwater, Indiana—to respond to the area’s outrage while attempting to support his teachers: “The community reaction was apoplectic. Daily, he met with more students and parents than he did aggrieved teachers. Some demanded transfers or teacher removals; one student claimed he no longer felt safe in Orchestra and asked for the music program to be suspended or dissolved.” The revelation that their teachers are flawed, sexual beings comes as quite a shock to the students, as does the invasive police investigation to catch the anonymous leaker. When it becomes clear that the “Clearwater Cloudburst” is not a one-time event, the pressure is on for Vince to stop the madness before the school tears itself apart. Rossi’s fluid prose shadows the interior lives of his large cast of characters, as here with Lana Collins, the school’s transgender French teacher: “Unlike many of her fellow educators, Lana greeted the release of her files with a sense of grim resignation rather than shock or betrayal. Her whole life, she reflected, constituted unwanted, forced exposure.” The premise is inspired, and the author plays it out in a way that allows him to grapple with a number of contemporary social cleavages. What’s more, the book speaks to that much older, deeper fear of having one’s true self revealed before the community. While the plot is overly neat at times, it makes for a fun, thought-provoking read.
A well-conceived and well-executed meditation on trust, privacy, and reputation.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2022
ISBN: 979-8986641300
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.
A love triangle among young literati has a long and complicated aftermath.
King’s narrator doesn’t reveal her name until the very last page, but Sam and Yash, the brainy stars of her 17th-century literature class, call her Jordan. Actually, at first they refer to her as Daisy, for Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, but when they learn she came to their unnamed college on a golf scholarship, they change it to Jordan for Gatsby’s golfer friend. The boys are housesitting for a professor who’s spending a year at Oxford, living in a cozy, book-filled Victorian Jordan visits for the first time after watching The Deer Hunter at the student union on her first date with Sam. As their relationship proceeds, Jordan is practically living at the house herself, trying hard not to notice that she’s actually in love with Yash. A Baptist, Sam has an everything-but policy about sex that only increases the tension. The title of the book refers to a nickname for the king of hearts from an obscure card game the three of them play called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, and both the game and variations on the moniker recur as the novel spins through and past Jordan’s senior year, then decades into the future. King is a genius at writing love stories—including Euphoria (2014), which won the Kirkus Prize—and her mostly sunny version of the campus novel is an enjoyable alternative to the current vogue for dark academia. Tragedies are on the way, though, as we know they must be, since nothing gold can stay and these darn fictional characters seem to make the same kinds of stupid mistakes that real people do. Tenderhearted readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears.
That college love affair you never got over? Come wallow in this gorgeous version of it.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780802165176
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.
A year in the life of the No. 2 boarding school in America—up from No. 19 last year!
Rumors of Hilderbrand’s retirement were greatly exaggerated, it turns out, since not only has she not gone out to pasture, she’s started over in high school, with her daughter Shelby Cunningham as co-author. As their delicious new book opens, it’s Move-In Day at Tiffin Academy, and Head of School Audre Robinson is warmly welcoming the returning and new students to the New England campus, the latter group including a rare midstream addition to the junior class. Brainiac Charley Hicks is transferring from public school in Maryland to a spot that opened up when one of the school’s most beloved students died by suicide the preceding year. She will be joining a large, diverse cast of adult and teenage characters—queen bees, jealous second-stringers, boozehounds young and old, secret lesbians, people chasing the wrong people chasing other wrong people—all of them royally screwed when an app called Zip Zap appears and starts blasting everyone’s secrets all over campus. How the heck…? Meanwhile, it seems so unlikely that Tiffin has jumped up to the No. 2 spot in the boarding-school rankings that a high-profile magazine launches an investigation, and even the head is worried that there may have been payola involved. The school has a reputation for being more social than academic, and this quality gets an exciting new exclamation point when the resident millionaire bad boy opens a high-style secret speakeasy for select juniors in a forgotten basement. It’s called Priorities. Exactly. One problem: Cinnamon Peters’ mysterious suicide hangs over the book in an odd way, especially since the note she left for her closest male friend is not to be opened for another year—and isn’t. This is surely a setup for a sequel, but it’s a bit frustrating here, and bobs sort of shallowly along amid the general high spirits.
A boarding-school fantasia, with Hilderbrand’s signature upgrades to the cuisine and decor. Sign us up for next term.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9780316567855
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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