I know term has been ‘in session’ for a while, but I thought as it is September and, for many, the start of the academic year, it would be fun to dive into the way different books use school settings, and why I think schools make for a great location in books, either as a backdrop or a focus.
Schools – and other educational settings – can work really well in fiction. They’re enclosed communities in many ways, and there are very few places where you will see so many people, in the same place, day in day out for so long. It offers for a wide range of characters, whether it’s the protagonist’s friends, romantic interests, allies or antagonists. If it’s YA, the school is likely the biggest part of the protagonist’s life, but even a teacher’s POV offers something unique in a school setting.
There are also very few places where characters of such various ages interact regularly – it’s a little more narrowed in the US, but the UK school system has kids from 4 – 11, then 11 – 16+, not to mention the various other school systems in the world. It gives rise to a variety of different conflicts which, again, don’t come into play as much if at all outside schools – a friendship ending when you have to see that person every day, a dramatic breakup which allows for everyone to know your business, an embarrassing crush, etc.
Schools are also a very familiar place to many readers – we remember our own school days, or for YA readers, are likely still living them. Readers can instantly relate to a character experiencing struggles at school, and on the contemporary end, a school is a great ecosystem to use for exploring societal issues. Julia Tuffs utilizes this in Hexed. Yes, the main character discovers she has witchy powers, but much like Sabrina before her, she has to learn to cope with these along with the everyday realities of being a teenager. And in Hexed, that means dealing with sexism from both students and teachers. Hexed conveys that sense of teenagers feeling powerless, even when they have something extraordinary like witch powers, and the school setting emphasises this.
How characters act in and react to a school setting can tell us an awful lot about them. Moving (briefly) away from a contemporary setting, Coriolanus Snow in Suzanne Collins’ The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes competes against his fellow students at the academy, reaching for a prize that will enable him to attend university. For Snow, university means everything, at least at the start of the novel; it’s the only way he can pull himself and his family out of the miserable existence they have following the decline of their family’s wealth. We see the students leaning in classes in the novel, and through this, we get an idea of the propaganda they’re being fed daily. Here, the school serves as a vehicle to explore these ideas and get across how The Hunger Games became what they became before Katniss entered the arena.
Back to a more contemporary setting, yet one which has a lot in common with Snow’s academy, in I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me, Jamison Shea introduces us to Laure Mesny. Although the setting isn’t strictly a school, it feels like one, and like the academy it’s cutthroat, with a dog-eat-dog mentality in the ‘students’. Laure has to fight even harder than Snow does, facing challenges due to racism and her privileged, white fellow ballerinas.
In both stories, the protagonists are ambitious and driven, and not afraid to reach for what they want, no matter the cost, though their reasons for this are completely different. Snow still has a level of respect among his peers, whereas Laure has to fight for every scrap of it, even after proving herself. Snow looks down on his fellow pupil because of his background; Laure is looked down on because of hers. Yet both settings underscore the youth of the protagonists, and allow for interactions and competition, as well as adding danger into places that are supposed to be somewhat ‘safe’ for young adults.
Then you have specialist schools, which can make for even richer settings and characters, as in Sara Nović literary YA novel, True Biz. Here, the school is a driving part of the plot, more than a setting; the River Valley School for the Deaf faces challenges, with the headmistress fighting to keep it open, while pupils push back against the way society tries to force control over their bodies and hearing.
I love seeing the way different writers use a similar setting, and how the same type of setting (ie a school or other educational facility) can be used in different ways, and to underscore different themes. They really are communities of their own, with different hierarchies, characters of different ages, and a sense of the universal in the way many have either experienced a school themselves, or are familiar with them in various ways thanks to TV, films and, of course, books!
What are some of your favourite books set in schools? Do you like school settings, or are there are any particular genres where you think schools have been used really effectively? There are definitely more I could have gone into here, from the horror novel The Tenth Girl to YA Contemporary Kate in Waiting, but maybe that’ll be a post for another day!
Unwrapping Words 