Also of interest… in school dramas
Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue (Little, Brown, $28)
“Emma Donoghue is among the most fearless contemporary novelists we have,” said Chris Bohjalian in The Washington Post. The author of Room also writes “outstanding” historical fiction, though, and her latest is a chronicle of a frenetic early-1800s affair between two girls at a Yorkshire boarding school. The story is fact-based, and Donoghue’s dramatization serves as a reminder that “teenagers in love 200 years ago were every bit as randy and reckless as teenagers today.”
Pet by Catherine Chidgey (Europa, $18)
This sly new psychological thriller “saves its most sinister twist for the end,” said Hephzibah Anderson in The Guardian. Its narrator is looking back to 1984, when she was 12, grieving her mother’s death, and suddenly showered with attention by a manipulative new teacher. Despite many hints of what’s to come, “the darkness of the novel’s denouement is hard to fully anticipate,” and because the narrator’s memory is clouded, the story’s power lingers “long after the final page has been turned.”
Never Enough by Jennifer Breheny Wallace (Portfolio, $29)
Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s book is “at once a description of an insidious problem and a call to arms,” said Meghan Cox Gurdon in The Wall Street Journal. “A timely exploration of adolescent achievement culture,” Never Enough profiles young people whose success in the climb to elite universities left them empty. The author, a journalist and mother, admits her own parenting errors while bringing “warmhearted enthusiasm” to describing how all parents can prioritize children’s well-being.
Empire of the Sum by Keith Houston (Norton, $32.50)
The story of the pocket calculator is one of innovation and obsolescence, said Alexander Nazaryan in The New York Times. Author Keith Houston, who delights in trying to make the arcane accessible, details how the abacus and slide rule gave way to direct precursors of the chunky TI graphing calculators toted by generations of calculus students. “There are thorny stretches in Empire of the Sum. It is, after all, a book about math.” It’s also a tale “full of oddballs, many of them brilliant.”