Send a child to boarding school on page one and you have handed the story everything it needs. The parents are gone — not tragically, just conveniently, several hundred miles away with the post arriving on Fridays. The building is old and much too large, with a wing nobody uses and a staircase that goes somewhere it should not. There is a bell for everything. There is a girl in the next bed who will either be the best friend of a lifetime or the enemy of the term, and it takes about four chapters to find out which. Best of all, the nights belong entirely to the children: no boarding school book worth the name goes to press without at least one midnight feast, one illicit corridor, and one plan that ought to have stayed a plan.
It is the most reliable engine in children’s fiction, which is why Bookroo’s collection runs to 248 boarding school books and our editors picked fourteen. Some are the obvious ones and have earned it — a boy learning he has a place at a school he has never heard of, a rich girl demoted to the attic, twelve little girls in two straight lines. Others are the schools that keep showing up in a reader’s next favorite book: a witch academy where the star pupil keeps crashing her broomstick, a puzzle-solving institute where the lessons are the trap, a girls’ school with a body in the gym, an undersea academy, and a spy school that recruits by breaking into your bedroom. Browse the picks below, then keep going by age — picture books for the youngest listeners, and chapter books and middle grade for readers ready to be dropped at the gates.
