Monday, April 24, 2006

Jen Robinson did a fun expansion on my what book would you like to live in? blog, adding fictional schools she would and wouldn't want to go to.

Bad schools, those are easy! All those descendents of... Lowood, was it, in Jane Eyre? such as that horible place in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Or was that an orphanage? They kind of blur together. And then there are those nasty unjust teachers who don't understand kids, like in Dicey's Song, or the one with an unforgiveable lack of poetry in her soul in The Boyhood of Grace Jones. Among high schools, Ellen Conford's "Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High" is memorable in its mundane yet hilarious awfulness.

I wanted to attend just about every non-villain-inhabited boarding school I ever read about, but can remember none of them at the moment, except the one in Apples Every Day, which I seem to be the only person in the world to have ever read.

But of course, Best-School-Ever: Betsy's school in Understood Betsy. Maria Montessori would be so proud. A close second: Gordon Korman's Don't Care High.