private schools

Examines the debate over public and private education in the United States, and explores the topics of school choice, homeschooling, charter schools, education standards, and school environment. Includes additional resources.

"At an elite private school nestled in the Colorado mountains, Natalie, an office assistant, dreams of having a life like the school moms she deals with every day. Women like Brooke--a gorgeous heiress, ferociously loving mother and serial cheater--and Asha, an overprotective mom who suspects her husband of having an affair. Their fates are bound by the handsome assistant athletic director Nicholas, whom Natalie loves, Brooke wants and Asha needs. But when two bodies are carried out of the school one morning, it seems the tension between mothers and daughters, rival lovers, and the haves and have-nots has shattered the surface of this isolated, affluent town--where people stop at nothing to get what they want"--Provided by publisher.

When the beautiful Serena van der Woodsen returns to Spenford after mysteriously getting kicked out of boarding school, the gossip flies among the privileged students at the Upper East Side private high school.

Having a world-traversing archaeologist dad means twelve-year-old Lola Benko is used to moving around and not putting down roots anywhere. But every day and every hunt for something hidden is an adventure, and no matter what, she and her dad are an unbeatable team. Then her father disappears. With the help of some new friends at her school, it's up to Lola to go on the most important hunt of her life.

"In her first novel since The Quick and the Dead, the legendary writer takes us into an uncertain landscape after the environmental apocalypse, a world in which only the man-made has value, but some still wish to salvage the authentic. Once nature as we know it is dead, the pursuit of happiness fades into insignificance, food is scarce, and even time doesn't progress in an organized fashion. Harrow follows the picaresque journey of Khristen--a teenager who, her mother believes, was marked by greatness as a baby when she died for a moment and then came back to life. After Khristen's failing boarding school for gifted teens closes its doors, and she finds that her mother has disappeared, she washes up at a "resort" on the shores of a mysterious, putrid lake the elderly residents there call "Big Girl." In a rotting honeycomb of rooms, these old ones plot actions to punish corporations and people they consider culpable in the destruction of the final scraps of nature's beauty. What will Khristen and Jeffrey, the precocious ten-year-old boy she meets there, learn from this "baggy seditious lot, in the worst of health but with kamikaze hearts, determined to refresh, through crackpot violence, a plundered earth"? Rivetingly strange and beautiful, delivered with Williams's searing, deadpan wit, their intertwined tale of paradise lost serves to commit us anew to that paradise, and to their reasons--against all reasonableness--to try and recover something of it"--Provided by publisher.

"Ellingham Academy must be cursed. Three people are now dead. One, a victim of either a prank gone wrong or a murder. Another, dead by misadventure. And now, an accident in Burlington has claimed another life. All three in the wrong place at the wrong time. All at the exact moment of Stevie's greatest triumph . . . She knows who Truly Devious is. She's solved it. The greatest case of the century. At least, she thinks she has. With this latest tragedy, it's hard to concentrate on the past. Not only has someone died in town, but David disappeared of his own free will and is up to something. Stevie is sure that somehow--somehow--all these things connect. The three deaths in the present. The deaths in the past. The missing Alice Ellingham and the missing David Eastman. Somewhere in this place of riddles and puzzles there must be answers. Then another accident occurs as a massive storm heads toward Vermont. This is too much for the parents and administrators. Ellingham Academy is evacuated. Obviously, it's time for Stevie to do something stupid. It's time to stay on the mountain and face the storm--and a murderer"--Provided by publisher.

Told in alternating perspectives, Todd replays the events that lead to his death in the local park, watching as detectives investigate his murder and talk to the students responsible for it, and meanwhile Georgia, who does not know Todd, cannot stop thinking about him.

Cora Miller, a student at Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, is tired of her adventures, and asks to be transferred to the Whitethorn Institute, which promotes conformity and tells students to ignore the doors that appear before them. Soon, the oppressive atmosphere of Whitethorn crushes Cora, and she decides to leave. But Whitethorn doesn't allow her or anyone else that privilege, trapping the students there for his own purposes.

The Ivies, five prep school elites who would kill to get into the colleges of their dreams, has a showdown after Liv gets into Harvard and queen bee Avery does not.

"Life is full of great expectations for Korean American Pippa Park. It seems like everyone, from her family to the other kids at school, has a plan for how her life should look. So when Pippa gets a mysterious basketball scholarship to Lakeview Private, she jumps at the chance to reinvent herself by following the 'Rules of Cool.' At Lakeview, Pippa juggles old and new friends, an unrequited crush, and the pressure to perform academically and athletically while keeping her past and her family's laundromat a secret from her elite new classmates. But when Pippa begins to receive a string of hateful, anonymous messages via social media, her carefully built persona is threatened. As things begin to spiral out of control, Pippa discovers the real reason she was admitted to Lakeview and wonders if she can keep her old and new lives separate, or if she should even try"--Back cover.