Boarding school stories go back a long way; I think the oldest one I’ve read is Tom Brown at Rugby (published 1857, set in the 1830s). I like Tom Brown; I’m fond of Stalky (1899, by Kipling of course) and just recently I enjoyed listening to P.G. Wodehouse’s Mike: A Public School Story (1909) as my workout book. I’ve enjoyed boarding school books by Madeleine L’Engle and Antonia Forest, and a bunch of others.
But what I’ve been reading a lot of lately are magical boarding school (henceforth, MBS) stories. There’s a lot of things you be said about those: you’ve got the traditional magic-story grouping of kids, and they’re away from parental supervision, but you can also have adults as allies instead of having to keep all the magic hidden from anyone old enough to drink.
The Harry Potter books aren’t the first MBS stories but they’re obviously the most famous. (Philosopher’s / Sorceror’s Stone was published in 1997.) I suppose there have been a bunch of books written to cash in on their popularity – but what I’m noticing is how many interesting books there are that share the basic trope (kid goes to MBA, makes friends, learns destiny, saves world) but take it in an entirely different direction.
The oldest one I know of is Jane Yolen Wizard’s Hall (1991, as far as I can tell.) In that one, Henry, renamed Thornmallow, is remarkable for *not* being able to perform magic – but of course he’s got a destiny, as the 113th pupil, and ends up saving the school. It’s an odd little book, not a blockbuster type – more the kind of thing you fall in love with and tihnk no one else knows about.
Alma Alexander’s Worldweavers trilogy share the idea of a protagonist who initially can’t perform magic, though she’s got great things expected of her because she’s the seventh child of a seventh child; they are unique so far among the MBP books I’ve encountered because the main character is a girl. They’re set in America, and combine a bunch of interesting things: Navajo mythologies, Russian fairy tales, computers, Nikola Tesla (in the third book).
Rick Riordan’s five Percy Jackson books are probably the best-known MBP books after Rowling’s, and they’re about to get a whole lot more famous, when the movie version of The Lightning Thief comes out next year. It’s a big-budget movie, obviously, since the case includes Uma Thurman, Sean Bean, Rosario Dawson and Pierce Brosnan (all as Greek gods, monsters or heroes – I bet they enjoyed that). I love the books; I hope the movie doesn’t screw up the story, There’s no need to, because as is it’s going to be plenty dramatic – of course, there’s always the challenge of paring a book down to fit it in a movie format.
Three of a planned eight books of Kaza Kingsley’s Erec Rex books are out so far. They are not quite boarding school stories but have the same feel to them; in the first book, Erec Rex: The Dragon’s Eye all of the characters come together in dormitory housing (attached to the royal palace) to participate in a contest for the next king. They’re also a little different in that the setting starts int he US but moves to a magical country (Alypium), though it dips back and forth between there are various parts of our world. In later books, all of Erec’s friends seem to be around, studying, whenever he comes back to Alypium, so the MBS feel is preserved. (More editing or a bit more writing experience for Kingsley would be nice; these get a bit clunky in spots, and the whole “focus on love” thing seems unlikely to me. But they have still been keeping me interested.)
Diana Wynne Jones’ Chrestomanci books are another not-quite-MBP series – Christopher Chant does spend some time in a boarding school that offers magic classes in the first book, but it’s mostly in the later books, where Chrestomanci and Milly bring a houseful of kids together to learn magic that I get the feeling of that sub-genre.
And then there are Henry H. Neff’s Hound of Rowan series, of which I’ve cruised through the first two this past week, then been disappointed to learn the third has been delayed until next year. They’re set in America, are a bit darker throughout than most of the series mentioned above, and I don’t think it’s much of a spoiler to say that the Hound of Rowan is definitely related to the Hound of Cullen. An unusual bit here is that the viewpoint character is gifted physically rather than in spell-casting. I mean, it’s not just a Harry-and-Hermione scene, where the friend has more book-smarts; Max’s magical talents are mostly physical and it’s his friend who has all the mystical power.
Suggestions for other Magical Boarding School stories are welcome – I’d especially like to read one that skips the destiny part, where the hero saves the world not because she’s born to do it but because, like some of Terry Pratchett’s best characters, she chooses to do what she doesn’t have to do.
I’d add DWJ’s The Year of the Griffin (the sequel to The Dark Lord of Derkholm) to the list as well, though you might classify it more as a campus novel (it’s set during a group of young wizards’ first year at university) than a boarding school novel (which seems to imply middle/high school aged characters).
Angie Sage’s Septimus Heap is a definitely on your list. 5 books so far in the series and Septimus spends most of it in a magical boarding school.
I’ll have to read more of that – I’ve only read the first Septimus Heap book.