• Joshua Gaylord’s personal experience as a prep school teacher gives him a unique vantage point, and he writes with a fresh and wise voice, both about the inner lives of students and about what goes on behind the closed door of the faculty lounge.

Spend a year at the Carmine-Casey School for Girls, an elite prep school on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. The year when this intimate private school community becomes tempestuous and dangerously incestuous, as the rivalries and secrets of teachers and students interact, intersect, and eventually collide.

In the world of students, popular and coquettish Dixie Doyle with ironic pigtails battles to wrest attention away from the smart and disdainful Liz Warren and her self-written plays based on Oresteia. In the world of teachers, the adored Leo Binhammer struggles to share his territory with Ted Hughes, the charming new English teacher who threatens to usurp Binhammer’s status as the department’s only male teacher and owner of the girls’ hearts. As a secret is revealed between them, Binhammer becomes increasingly fascinated by the man he has determined is out to get him.

As seasons change and tensions mount, the girls begin to long for entry into the adult world, toying with their premature powers of flirtation. Meanwhile the deceptive innocence of the adolescent world—complete with plaid skirts and scented highlighters—becomes a trap into which the flailing teachers fall. By the end of the year the line between adults and teenagers begins to blur, and the final exam is: who are the adults and who are the children?