Tom Brown's School Days

Tom Brown's School Days by Thomas Hughes

This is a pretty well done Librivox book. Tom Brown is a boy going to Rugby school. He plays sports like football and cricket and help boys work together. He is asked to help a young boy who is starting the school. He finds himself defending the boy when he is praying. He does more to work with him and grows as a person. He gains more empathy and appreciation for others. It is a well done and accessible today. It feels like a predecessor of the many "boarding school" stories that have come out since then.

And Both Were Young

And Both Were Young by Madeleine L'Engle

A girl goes off to boarding school in Switzerland. She has trouble fitting in. She is seen as not good at sports, though she is good at drawing. With the help of a teacher, she gradually becomes more happy at school. She also meets a boy who she likes. Later some mystery man comes and claims to be the father of the boy. She has a plan to try to verify and ends up getting hurt. They later discover the man was a con artist and the boy's parents died in the holocaust.

The girl has been secretly training in skiing with the aid of the boy and the teacher that befriended her. She enters a ski contest (to the chagrin of the PE teacher.) She fails to win because she stopped to help a fallen classmate, but gets the grand trophy anyway. She sees her father friends with the teacher she liked - but he says it is too soon after her mother died for him to get serious. 

It is a nice boarding school story that has conflict, but does not get too extreme.

Alliance: The Paladin Prophecy Book 2

Alliance is the second book in a boarding school series. The kids all have their friendships and weird new things start to happen. Will West and his friends are trying to find out more about the secret society and beings that are trying to take over the world. The difference between good and evil starts to get fairly murky. They find new things out about people they know. They also begin to find other kids with powers. And in the process, love starts to kick in. Will is torn between two close friends who both have romantic attachments. The big "adventure" is the exploration of a castle next to campus and the unearthing of more knowledge of the past. The book answers a lot of questions, and then ends with even more questions. The writing is fairly fast paced, but does tend to telegraph future intentions a little too much, while at the same time having the kids just "know" things.

The Vanishing Stair

I've read a few of "boarding school" books close together and it is hard to keep them straight. They all involve "gifted" children who are plucked away from their home and do amazing things. In the Truly Devious series, the things involve solving mysteries. This novel eventually picks up where the other one left off. Our heroine is bored silly at home in Pittsburgh. Luckily, the right wing senator (and her parent's employer) comes to encourage her to go back to school. Her parents comply. Back there she gets to spend more time investigating the school deaths past and present. (The novel includes regular interludes of the 1930s to give us details of the past murder.) She gets to meet a professor who wrote "the" book on the murders and is working on new research. Alas, we do not get good vibes from her. Her security guard "friend" warns her not to go exploring. Alas, she does, and ends up finding the dead body of a missing classmate. The security guard eventually leaves. However, she contacts him after she "solves" the original murders. (As readers, we get the "full story" of the original murders as part of an interlude in the story.) Alas, the book seems to end right before the action wraps up. These books were written in cliffhanger fashion and do not stand alone well. A lot of loose threads from the previous book are wrapped up. However, there are many more things opened that we want resolved at the end. And, being a teen book, we also get some interesting interpersonal relationships going that are left in quite a messy state. Oh well. I guess that leaves us eagerly anticipating the next book in the Truly Devious series.

The Paladin Prophecy: Book 1

Will West is raised as somewhat of a nomad. His parents move about every 18 months to some new location. His father is a nuerobiology researcher and always is switching to new projects. They instruct him to live under the radar. He loves to run, but has to control himself to not be the fastest. He also intentionally does less than his best academically. Then one day, he accidentally aces an intelligence evaluation test and has a boarding school seek him out and offer a big scholarship. At the same time a bunch of secretive agents also try to catch him. He manages to evade them with the help of a taxi driver who later assists hi remotely. He makes it out to the boarding school where he makes friends and gradually learns more. There are bits of supernatural in the process. He learns that previous inhabitants of earth had gained too much knowledge and power and were banished. However, they are using manipulatable humans to get back to earth. He is to help get them back. His mother has been controlled by some of these bad guys.
He discovers that he has power to read other people's thoughts and to push images to computers. He can also run and heal super fast. Some of the other kids at the boarding school also have great latent powers such as photographic memory.
He seems to be able to identify the good guys from the bad guys long before we know which ones are which.
There is finally a big fight at the end and the kids discover who they really are. It all fits squarely in the "kids at a boarding school that will save the world" genre.