March 7, 2012
Storied Mariana Academy was founded with a serious honor code, its reputation unsullied for decades. Now Prisom’s Party threatens its placid halls.
A budding journalist whose only confidant is the chain-smoking specter of Edward R. Murrow, Iris Dupont knows that she can break into the ranks of the Party’s underground newspaper, and there uncover the real source of its blackmail schemes and vilifying rumors. Some involve a biology teacher who, as one of Mariana’s only Jews, has long been held with suspicion. Others point to an albino student who left school abruptly, never to return. And everything connects to a rare book called Marvelous Species. But the truth is not without its own dangers, leaving Iris torn between her allegiances, her reporter’s instinct, and her own troubled past.
The Year of the Gadfly is an exhilarating journey of double-crosses, long-buried secrets, and all the charge of adolescence, following in the footsteps of classic school novels like Prep and The Secret History, and reminding us how these years haunt our lives forever.
A budding journalist whose only confidant is the chain-smoking specter of Edward R. Murrow, Iris Dupont knows that she can break into the ranks of the Party’s underground newspaper, and there uncover the real source of its blackmail schemes and vilifying rumors. Some involve a biology teacher who, as one of Mariana’s only Jews, has long been held with suspicion. Others point to an albino student who left school abruptly, never to return. And everything connects to a rare book called Marvelous Species. But the truth is not without its own dangers, leaving Iris torn between her allegiances, her reporter’s instinct, and her own troubled past.
The Year of the Gadfly is an exhilarating journey of double-crosses, long-buried secrets, and all the charge of adolescence, following in the footsteps of classic school novels like Prep and The Secret History, and reminding us how these years haunt our lives forever.
