9 Best Campus Novels (and One Memoir) By Emily Layden |
Emily Layden’s incisive debut novel, All Girls
, offers a composite portrait of an exclusive girls’ boarding school on the cusp of a long-overdue reckoning with a sexual abuser on the faculty. Set during the 2015-16 school year, shortly before the emergence of the #MeToo movement, the story of the predator’s unmasking is an astute snapshot of a venerable institution being pulled, however unwillingly, into its future. Here Layden picks ten of her favorite books set on-campus.
Before I’d written a page of my novel
All Girls, I’d drawn on the yellow lined paper of a legal pad a map of my book’s fictional boarding school: the round loop of its campus drive; the placement of the various dorms across a wide green; the woods that bordered the back edge of my rural enclave. This exercise had a practical purpose: I needed to understand the layout of my school to describe how my characters moved around