School Days

A Novel

By: Jonathan Galassi

Narrated by: Robert Fass

The new novel from the acclaimed poet and publisher asks fundamental questions about love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the age-old dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student.

Sam Brandt is a long-term denizen of Connecticut’s renowned Leverett School. As an English teacher, he has dedicated his life to providing his students with the same challenges, encouragement, and sense of possibility that helped him and his friends become themselves here half a lifetime ago.

Then Leverett’s headmaster asks Sam to help investigate a charge brought by one of his classmates that he was abused by a teacher. Sam is flooded with memories, above all of his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie and the support and friendship of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson.

Sam’s search for the truth becomes a quest to get at the heart of Leverett, then and now. The school has changed enormously over the years, but at its core lie assumptions about privilege and responsibility untested for more than a century. And Sam’s assumptions about his own life are shaken, too, as he struggles to understand what really happened all those years ago.

©2022 Jonathan Galassi (P)2022 Blackstone Publishing

Tough subject

I thought the story was well executed. The author didn't shy away nor gloss over realities but he also didn't add gratuitous descriptions that would have ruined the mood by turning the story into erotica.