The Sixth Form
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
When seventeen-year-old Ethan Whitley leaves his home in California for Berkley Academy, a prestigious Massachusetts prep school, he's a blank slate, a shy follower of rules in search of himself. Ethan is given the chance to start over when he is hand-picked by his wealthy, disaffected classmate, Todd Eldon, and a seductive, enigmatic teacher, Hannah McClellan, a free spirit for whom rules were meant to be broken.
Life with Todd and Hannah is a revelation, an invitation to a world of privilege and desire. But looming over these heady evenings is the disturbing mystery of Hannah's fragmented past, one that Ethan longs desperately to understand.
As secrets are revealed, Ethan is pulled deep into the undertow of Hannah's history and Todd's longings. Soon, he learns that every deceit has a price, every lie is an ugly truth, and that those he has come to trust are people he doesn't know at all.
"In the tradition of Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, with just the right hint of Tom Brown's Schooldays, Dolby gives us a glimpse into the rarefied world of elite New England boarding schools and manages at the same time to say something new about adolescence, sexuality, and the way art can give us what we need to survive. --Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits
"Dolby puts his own prep school experience to fine use in his second novel. . .beautifully observed." --Publishers Weekly
"A tender and funny novel." --David Ebershoff
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dolby (The Trouble Boy) puts his own prep school experience to fine use in his second novel, which chronicles the travails of Ethan Whitley, the smart but insecure 17-year-old son of Stanford professors, who spends his senior (or "sixth form") year at Berkley Academy, an elite co-ed boarding school in Massachusetts. Todd Eldon, a classmate who befriends Ethan, introduces him to a world of wealth and privilege. Such moments as the awestruck Ethan's reaction to Todd's family's Manhattan apartment ("was that really a Mir , he wondered, in the living room?") and how Todd's nouveau riche mother, an author of popular fiction, decorates the place for Christmas are beautifully observed. Hannah McClellan, a progressive English teacher with a mysterious past, also cultivates Ethan. As the story darkens, the reader expects the axe to fall at any moment. That it never does may annoy some, but most will be gratified that kind fate alone saves the principal characters from their own foolishness. This isn't a novel for people who want to know what a prep school is like; rather, it's a reminder how close disaster always is when you're 17.
