School Days

by Jonathan Galassi

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 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.

Genres: Fiction, Gay, Historical Fiction, Audiobook, Queer, LGBT, Dark Academia

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2022

About the author

Jonathan Galassi born 1949 in Seattle, Washington, is the President and Publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, one of the eight major publishers in New York. He began his publishing career at Houghton Mifflin in Boston, moved to Random House in New York, and finally, to Farrar, Straus & Giroux. He joined FSG as executive editor in 1985, after being fired from Random House. Two years later, he was named editor-in-chief, and is now President and Publisher.

Galassi is also a translator of poetry and a poet himself. He has translated and published the poetic works of the Italian poets Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale. His honors as a poet include a 1989 Guggenheim Fellowship, and his activities include having been poetry editor for The Paris Review for ten years, and being an honorary chairman of the Academy of American Poets. He has published poems in literary journals and magazines including Threepenny Review, The New Yorker, The Nation and the Poetry Foundation website.

Galassi graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy where he became interested in poetry, writing and literature, and from Harvard College in 1971. He was a Marshall Scholar at Christ's College, Cambridge. He realized while attending Christ’s College that he wanted a career in book publishing. Galassi was born in Seattle (his father worked as an attorney for the Justice Department), but he grew up in Plympton, Massachusetts. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews

[Alex Myers · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rather terrible. The plot was non-existent. Just a nostalgic rambling of a school teacher. Towards the end, some vague existential fumblings. My major complaint was that there are four billion characters, all of them interchangeable. The author gives them all names and then refers to them sometimes by first name, sometimes by last name - it is hopeless to keep track of them.

[George Ilsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

He wanted to ask so many things about this love of his — why he felt so alone in it, where it was taking him, how he was going to survive it. His left brain told him it wasn't everything and wouldn't last forever, but he couldn't afford to believe it.

The 1960s at a New England boarding school provided the best material in this novel; the contemporary scenes felt a little forced, a bit too much "torn from the headlines." The confusion extracted above felt achingly real in the 1960s, but the main character's development into adulthood was not always convincing. Compounded with that was the almost predictable scandal at the school, unearthed from previous times and glimpsed through murky layers of "he said / he said".

There are many characters here (or at least many names) and just like real life they come and go with varying degrees of impact and influence. There is a list of "Principal Characters" at the beginning, which did not offer much assistance navigating the names — it was the minor characters who were slippery.

My appreciation of this novel waxed and waned; at times I was very enthusiastic, full of admiration for perfect sentences. At other points I was less enthralled.

Overall, let's just say 4 stars and move on with our lives, shall we?

[Kyle C · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sam Brandt is an English teacher at a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, which he had graduated from in the 1960s. After the head of school receives a concerning letter from a former student, Sam is forced to reexamine his memories of life as a student and the friends and teachers he admired. Like Cynthia Ozick's Antiquities, also set in a New England boarding school, Galassi's School Days exposes the fallible memories of adolescence and the entangled friendships and romances that only make sense with distant hindsight. Too preoccupied with his own unrequited love for his roommate, Brandt was only partly aware of the libertine escapades of his friends and completely oblivious to the more sinister behavior of some faculty members. Forty years later, he must reckon with the blindsight of teenage solipsism.

I do not know if I liked this book. It is compellingly written with beautiful prose and artful precision. There are some touchingly poignant moments of affection and muted intimacy between the friends, both as students and decades later as adults. I particularly liked the line, "Eddie's idealizing of Sam had been a way, Sam used to think, of keeping the real him, with his inconvenient needs and desires, at arm's length". The students are pugilistic and pretentious, precociously arguing about Freud and Marxism at night, going to MOMA on the weekend, and boasting about their straight and gay dalliances alike. In the rigidly homosocial microcosm of a boarding school, the playground of the scions of senators and executives, the boundaries between friendship, family and romance become hazy. Whether gay or not, they form guarded queer bonds of affection (unlike the review in the New York Times , I don't think that cuddling or holding hands is actually implausible for a 1960s boarding school; it's precisely this vulnerable tenderness between friends that made and still makes outright homosexuality so transgressive to teenagers).

But I was troubled by its portrayal of an ambiguously charismatic and predatory teacher, Mr Gibson. Alan Bennett did this already with The History Boys. Like Bennett's Hector, the teacher seems to be more an impresario than a pedagog, rapidly discharging witty banter and bon mots to bewilder his students into charmed submission. He is captivatingly cynical, seemingly more on their side than the administration's, and he is a caring mentor. He listens to his students, nurtures their talents and encourages their curiosities. But, as it later emerges, he also preyed on them surreptitiously. What is the point of these stories? To lament the erstwhile homophobia that forced gay men into lonely bachelorhood? To exonerate their behavior as the compulsive actions of repressed delinquents? I don't understand the need to write sentimental portraits for these kinds of abusive teachers. It's sad and tragic but it also perpetuates hateful stereotypes of gay predators. From Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative to the "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida, there is a long history associating gay men with pedophilia. Move on.

[Siena · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first 90 pages? Atmospheric! Intriguing! The closest you can get to reading published “Dead Poets Society” or “A Separate Peace” fanfiction!

The rest? Boring. Typo-ridden (this is by the chairman of FSG ffs, what happened there?). Uncomfortably close to grooming apologia considering what the premise is????

All in all—just read some “Dead Poets Society” fanfic on AO3, you will have more fun and feel less icky

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Leverett School features a school newspaper called The Hutch, though confusingly we're not told whether this hutch holds dishes or bunnies, or why either would be appropriate for their publication. Or did the author confuse rabbits with hares? Like so much about this school story, the effort to endow the institution with meaning and purpose misses its target. The story is told in two time tracks featuring the same principal character. Sam was a schoolboy at Leverett in 1964; now he teaches there. In the contemporary story, a letter to the head of school arrives from a former student threatening legal action against a revered former English and Classics teacher and Sam is commissioned to investigate. Then the plot winds back to the school in 1964 when Sam was a student. As the story unfolds in both past and present time, the school seems squalider and squalider. Leverett fortunately has since accepted girls, which gives hope for the future, though the school has no moral, spiritual, or intellectual ehos. It's fascinating how rich a novel can be set in an all girls school—like Emily Layden's All Girls—and how flat boys' school stories like this—and the hugely overrated A Separate Peace—fall. Unfortunately, teenaged boys simply don't do relationships: even their crushes are really about themselves. Sam discovered women later as an undergraduate, then left his wife and grown children and indentified as gay; as he travelled about the country interviewing old Leverett boys he also had lots of shallow internet hook-ups, though now we're supposed to believe he has a relationship with an associate Classics professor. He also discovers that a lot was going on when he was a schoolboy of which he was unaware. I suspect I'm not the only reader who wishes he'd remained that way.

[BosGuy · Rating 4 out of 5]

School Days by Jonathan Galassi is a rivetting gay fiction novel told from the perspective of Sam Brandt, a former student of Leverett, an elite boarding school in New England, and current English teacher at the prep school.

The setting and Sam’s memory provide a romanticized backdrop of his formative teenage years. The range of emotions and struggles he faces are relatable even for those who never attended boarding school. While the story initially appears to be about Sam trying to learn the truth about what happened on campus all those years ago, the real take away is the need we all have for acceptance and love.

The book is entertaining and satisfying on several levels thanks to Galassi’s easy writing style and the beautiful way he uses language to depict touching and important moments in Sam’s life. The two storylines from life in 1967 and 2007 entwine, separate, and come back together again seamlessly and provide Sam with some fairly profound insights about himself and the school he loves so much.

For more about the novel, you can read my full review here:
https://bosguy.com/2022/05/10/book-re...

[Charles Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I think about all the weighty issues that Galassi could have dealt with but ignored in School Days, I want to rename it School Daze. Not a single reference to the Kinsey Scale in a book that is awash with fluidity in sexual preference and identity. It’s not a serious examination either of what was/was not appropriate behavior for teachers vis-à-vis their teen charges in the last three decades of the twentieth century. There’s no brief summary of what is known about adults who abuse children. Homophobia, self-hatred, heteronormative parental expectations, repressed sexuality—all glossed over or ignored. No one is psychoanalyzed, institutionalized, or sent off to a camp to have their sexual orientation repaired. Flashpoints of gay history and literature are totally ignored—Stonewall, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Harvey Milk, AIDS, Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell. At least Alan Ginsburg got a mention.

I know something about the character Galassi created with Sam Brandt, because I graduated from a Catholic academy for boys in 1968 and went on to a long career in teaching. I had crushes on boys from grade 6 through college. My body ripened long before my psyche and intellect could catch up. Even as late bloomer, I was terrified of my own sexuality and chose to teach at the elementary level because I feared I would be attracted to high school-aged boys. I had already been teaching a dozen years before I finally dipped my toe into the pool of sexual experience with a man my own age. Just before coming out at age 33, I had received superb counseling from an LCSW on my family history and relationships and how to go about deciding to act on my sexual attractions.

Is this novel supposed to be some kind of romp, so that Sam the senior citizen can go back and have sex with all the guys he was attracted to as a senior at Leverett? What should we make of his decision to marry Anne and have a child? And isn’t he lucky that his ex-wife is not bitter, and that his son Frank allows him to see his grandsons? What a carefree existence Sam Brant has had. A reviewer described School Days as “a psychological mystery.” Hmmm. What do you think?

This review is not an endorsement of amazon.com or any business owned by Jeff Bezos. Books for my reviews were checked out from a public library, purchased from a local brick-and-mortar book shop, or ordered from my favorite website for rare and out-of-print books.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

School Days is a slow, somewhat sleepy unraveling of memory, identity, complicity, and moral ambiguity set against the familiar prestige of a New England boarding school. It's not thrilling, but it is thoughtful.

The novel follows Sam, once a student at Leverett and now a teacher, as he’s forced to confront the darker truths buried in the past, especially surrounding Theo, a once-admired teacher now facing serious accusations. What worked for me is how this book quietly pokes at the fragility of memory: the way a person can be seen as a mentor, even a hero, by one person and something much darker to another. There’s a lot of truth in that dissonance. Sam’s reckoning, quiet as it is, feels real, and I appreciated that the book doesn’t romanticize Theo’s actions. Instead, it presents a few fragmented, sometimes contradictory accounts that make the reader sit in that discomfort.

That said, the book is also boring. It meanders, gets bogged down in fluff, and the constant name-switching (first name, last name, repeat) made it harder than it needed to be to follow. I can see what it was going for (nostalgia clashing with reckoning; identity shaped by institutions) but I wish it had more urgency. Though it didn't always hold my attention, it is a decent book that I'm glad to have seen through.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up and read it for a pop-up book group with the author. I always love a great academic novel and this dual timeline, set in a boys' boarding school did not disappoint me. It had all the expected themes, but in Galassi's deft hands, it felt fresh. The characters are well defined and I was able to keep the large cast clear in my mind (except for the first name/last name thing when a character in the same paragraph was identified by one or the other, I am thinking about you Ray Kaiser). The author was a delight in a small setting and I highly recommend this slim novel.

[Tom Holehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A Separate Peace" meets "Dead Poets Society" in this moving novel set mostly at a tony prep boarding school in Connecticut. An English teacher at the school, who was also a student there, looks back at his life there and the influences that made him the man he is today with secrets to still unearth. Questions about his beloved mentor rise to the surface forcing the teacher to reevaluate all he knew about the man. It is sometimes hard to keep track of the numerous students and teachers introduced here especially when the author mingles first and last names of characters in the same paragraph, but the story still propels and engages the reader forward in a breathless 200 pages.

[Wally Wood · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Head of School asks Sam Brandt, a former student at the exclusive Leverett School and now a long-time English teacher at the school, to investigate a letter from one of Brandt’s classmates which alleges that he was sexually abused by a teacher when he was a student.

That’s the setup for School Days. An exclusive boy’s prep school in Connecticut. Two time lines—the 1960s and the present. Fifteen characters—Sam’s friends and teachers during his student days at Leverett and today’s colleagues. The reader sees the school from both student and teacher perspective. How it was, and how it is.

The plot—was the student abused or not—is secondary. Rather, the novel is a consideration of love and sex, friendship and rivalry, desire and power, and the dance of benevolence and attraction between teacher and student. As the publisher notes, “Sam is flooded with memories of attending Leverette in the sixties: the beautiful reaches of the campus, the constellation of boys whose lives were, at one point, knit up with his own, the support and friendship of his most inspiring mentor, Theodore Gibson, and above all his overwhelming love for his friend Eddie.”

Jonathan Galassi is the chairman of Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, the former poetry editor of the Paris Review, a former chairman of the Academy of American Poets, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for poetry. He has published three books of original poetry and translations of the poetry of Eugenio Montale, Giacomo Leopardi, and Primo Levi. His first novel, Muse, set the world of publishing, was published in 2015.

With Galassi’s background as poet and editor, the writing in School Days is superior without calling attention to itself. The book is filled with interesting observations and thoughts. Although Galassi has never been a teacher, here is a representative paragraph:

“Sam loved teaching. True, the kids were unchanging, predictably fresh-faced and self-preoccupied while he and his peers grew ever hoarier and more crotchety. What kept him engaged was the hunger of some of them, their desire to take hold. To devour life whole, with the help of a well-timed nudge or two from their mentors. The moment when a student understands how a book makes its impact not frontally but by stealth, how it imperceptibly changes us, when it does, forever, was for him, as the saying goes, better than sex. He’d seen kids literally come alive, as had happened to him: slough off their families’ need to shroud them in security and open themselves up to riskier ways of becoming themselves, at times with spectacular results. These were the achievements he was proudest of.”

On reflection, School Days seems to spend a lot of time on sex and the adolescent confusion of sex with love, entirely expected in the hothouse of a private boy’s school and turbulent teenage hormones. Sam as a middle-aged man still seems undecided about his own sexuality. He was married, but retains sexual feelings for Eddie and, late in the book is hooking up with men he finds online. (Although, where is it written that you have to decide your own sexuality? That you can be sexually attracted only to people of your own sex?)

Perhaps more importantly, Galassi explores the issue of teacher/student power relations and the opportunities and dangers of abuse. There is also the issue of entitlement. Leverett’s students are entitled. They have affluent, if not wealthy, parents. They are on escalator to an ivy league school; Harvard welcomes them. It influences the way they see themselves and the world.

(I once asked a friend on the staff of a private girls’ school what percentage of their graduates go to college. She looked at me with surprise at my innocence. A hundred percent, she said.)

In an author talk, Galassi said, “Sam has a lot of unfinished business in his life,” and in the last quarter of the book we follow him as he looks up former classmates to try to finish some of that business. I’m not sure he does. In a last, first-person chapter, Sam muses, “We were all . . . trying to slough off the selves we’d been handed and become someone else: to rise and fly where we like, break fully out and away. We never could, though, try as we might.”

Nevertheless, Sam’s effort to do so makes School Days superior and engaging literary fiction.

[BookBagDC · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a story about identity and how it can be made, and unmade, by one’s heroes.  Sam Brandt has taught English at Leverett School, a prestigious Connecticut boarding school, for decades.  Years earlier, he had come to Leverett as a naive student and was powerfully shaped by his teachers and his peers -- and he aims to provide the same experience to his own students.  Then, the head of school asks Sam to help Leverett investigate a charge by one of his lclassmates that, while a student at Leverett, the classmate was abused by a teacher -- a teacher who had also been Sam's mentor and, for decades, one of school's most prominent figures until his death a few years ago.

Sam agrees to help the school and his classmate investigate what happened.  As he undertakes his investigation, Sam finds himself once again enmeshed in his memories of the formative time of his life, as he became an adult, found his passion and professional path, had his first, largely unrequited, love, and struggled with his sexuality.  The deeper Sam explores the events of his childhood and the years since, the more he is forced to confront how well he knew his classmates, his mentor, and even himself -- and what that means for the foundation on which he has built his entire adult life.

This was a powerful book.  It handles the several sensitive topics at the heart of the book with nuance and depth.  Sam's dual struggles -- with the role his mentor played in his and his peers' lives and with his own sexuality while a student and in the years since -- and the juxtaposition of the two time periods created a rich narrative for exploring issues of power and exploitation, friendships and rivalry, the intersection of the personal and professional, privilege, identity, family, love, and how time changes relationships especially with those once considered idols.  

Highly recommended.

[Molly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm quite sure I'm not the intended reader for this novel. It's a framed story, a story within a story. Sam has come back to teach at his beloved high school, a fancy boarding school in the Northeast. The headmaster asks him to check out accusations against his favorite teacher, one made by one of the boys in his group. Although this book has beautiful prose, I didn't love the story. It was confusing; the homoerotic love of too many boys were remembered, and it left me cold and frustrated even as *some* justice was played out.

[Zea · Rating 2 out of 5]

embarrassing to still be so obsessed with high school and even more embarrassing to have this take on sexual abuse of students by teachers. woof. go big red ig

[Anna · Rating 2 out of 5]

not sure what the point of all this was

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love a campus novel. I will pick up any book about boys at a boarding school or small liberal arts college, especially if it’s dark, queer, and with an ensemble of characters. When I saw SCHOOL DAYS at Barnes & Noble, I had to pick it up right away.

Sam now works at the boarding school he attended when he was younger, the last year it was a boys-only school. When the school receives a letter from a student accusing the school of covering up sexual abuse, the head of the school asks Sam to investigate since they graduated at the same time.

I was disappointed in this book. Despite the sexual abuse, I thought the story sounded interesting. The book starts in 2007, jumps back to the 1960s, and then follows up in the 2007. This book is not long but half of the book is setting the backstory of the investigation in the second half of the book. There were so many characters who were addressed by either first or last name that I was confused. I didn’t really get much sense of Sam as a character. I couldn’t help but think this was based on the author’s life. (The author, the executive Editor of FSG, went to a prestigious boarding school then Harvard.) I thought the structure was not very elegant and the author could have woven the two time periods together differently. By the end of the book, I wasn’t really interested in the story. It left me with more questions than I started with but not enough to really care.

The book is quite short and a fast read. The sentences were well constructed, so they were quite readable.▪️

[Zibby Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is about a boarding school, one of the old-fashioned historic boarding schools, and about the life of the students there back in the sixties when it was all boys. You see the school evolve over time. But it's also about the teachers at the school, the kind of sacrifices they made for their students, and the issues they faced in their life there.

The author developed so many different characters, from the teachers to the boys. It's basically an all-boys society. The story shows the different boys having different reactions to that. The book was layered with a coming-of-age tale about the awakening of sexuality and how different boys handled their feelings for each other. YOu also see teachers having different ways of relating to the students. Everybody handled it differently. I also loved watching everyone develop over time. It was satisfying to get the flash-forward where we could revisit them later in life.

To listen to my interview with the author, go to my podcast at:
https://www.momsdonthavetimetoreadboo...

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so many choices made throughout the telling of this nostalgic, complex memory tale that it could have gone so wrong, but the author doesn't stumble. Bravo.

Having personally lived some of these experiences and through the subsequent reunions, large or small, it all felt familiar, authentic.

Galassi understands his characters, their sublimated as well as realized desires and even sometimes their need to thwart their desires.

It is a cautionary tale, but despite the betrayals, the inept bunglings, the selfishness, there remain a few positive takeaways: that the reciprocal bond between teacher and pupil (in the right hands) can be a noble and glorious thing and that love is not to be bartered or withheld but to be given freely and shared.

[DRugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poetic examination of male adolescence within WASPY privileged American culture. The writing and imagery touch on universal themes of self discovery, love, sexuality, and life’s meaning.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m a bit on the fence about this book, it was readable but some aspects of it I didn’t find compelling.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was so pointless.

[Gabby Wood · Rating 2 out of 5]

a whole lot of nothing

[Minnikin]

I really need to read some cheerful books. This one just made me glad I am not a part of this world.

[Corny · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a former attendee of one of these schools during the time in question, I can attest to the verisimilitude of the setting. Galassi has captured perfectly the sexual repression of the age, as well as the tendency of the teachers to become objects of student adoration, especially in a boarding school setting without parents. The plot, however, seen through the prism of one man's sexual odyssey, does not ring true. I have trouble imagining the dialogs between 15 and 16 year old boys that Galassi has written. These professions of love just don't ring true. Sexual tension, yes. Sex, maybe, but all these outpourings of feelings from the mouths of adolescents -- I just can't see it. Interactions with teachers, on the other hand, were well portrayed. We are still discovering incidents from this era, that had remained buried for decades, because they were deliberately overlooked in the day. The author gives us an authentic look at how these interactions might have taken place. Thus, for the most part, I enjoyed the read and am especially happy that virtually all Boarding Schools are now coed!

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poet Jonathan Galassi’s new novel unfolds in multiple time frames, to unravel a tale about desire (requited and unrequited) at an elite boarding school. While I occasionally thought there were a few too many characters to keep track of, I otherwise enjoyed the spinning of this tale. As someone who taught college for many years, the scenes of academic politics rang true, as did the tales of male desire in the 1960s. (I was in high school myself in the late 60s, and those scenes also rang true.) I don’t want to reveal anything about the plot, but a novel about the ethics of desire seems appropriate to our times.

[Colin Kerr · Rating 1 out of 5]

prep school sex

This book is about prep school sex. I'm not sure it has anything new to say on the subject. Having gone to a peep school around the same time as the characters in this book, we were nowhere near as homoerotically obsessed. we did have one teacher who had to be dismissed.

[Robert Swanson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. But, there were so many characters and back and forth in time, that it was somewhat confusing. It did all come together at the end, but I will re-read it having a much better idea of who is who. It will be worth the re-read. The book is very well written, with an infusion of history, letters and poetry.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

How much of your former self is within your current self? It seems, at least in Jonathan Galassi's School Days, that there is always Little You inside Current You, reminding yourself who you once were. Sam Brandt teaches English at Leverett, an elite boarding school in Connecticut. Sam is also a Leverett alumni. He's recently separated from his wife, though for reasons that won't become clear until later on. Otherwise, he's relatively content. Then a former classmate, who left under swift and mysterious circumstances, writes a goading letter to the current headmaster. In it, he makes some distressing remarks about a former teacher. This prompts the headmaster to have Sam do some quiet digging on his former classmate and the situation, leading Sam to recollect his time as a student at Leverett, mainly his intense connections and friendships (and crushes) on some of his fellow classmates, when at the time Leverett was an all-boys school. He also recollects on his former English teacher, Theo Gibson, a younger, hipper version of teacher than was currently teaching in private school in 1967. In the present (of the book (2007)), Gibson is dead. The letter is about him, alleging at an inappropriate relationship he may have had with his former student (maybe even with others). Yet this not a book about what Gibson may or may not have done, at least not entirely, but a book about suppression, repression, and for those lucky enough to escape, acceptance of self. Leverett being elite, the students and faculty were, are, expected to act a certain way, sometimes in ways that suppress true desires. But for a book about repression, there is a lot of expressive expression of desire. There are also a bunch of characters given identities within a framework that are hard to keep a bead on. And the central conflict turns out to be, oddly, troublingly, not so conflicting. Still, Galassi reminds us that who we were doesn't have to be who we are, but they're still with us every day.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Sam Brandt, our narrator, attended the Leverett School, an all-boys boarding school in Connecticut in the mid 1960s. Flash forward and Brandt has been teaching English lit at the same institution for two decades. His headmaster asks him to investigate a charge of sexual misconduct leveled by a student from yesteryear who happens to be one of Sam's former classmates. The alleged perpetrator was a teacher who influenced and inspired Sam and many Leverett students.

School Days (which is an insipid title) travels primarily between 2007 and Brandt's time as a student at Leverett. Sam, recently separated from his wife, looks back at his unrequited love for Eddie, a former classmate, and the anguish he experienced around his sexuality. The guy has some unresolved issues.

I had hopes (not high, but medium) for this exploration of male and queer sexuality among a largely privileged set of boys. But I felt overwhelmed with the number of characters Galassi sketches in all-too-broad strokes. As the chairman of FS&G, Galassi should know better. I had trouble tracking who many of the boys were and who was sleeping with whom. That's a problem. There didn't feel like there was anything fresh here. The prose was fine but unremarkable. On the plus side, I read this novel on a slow Sunday and didn't invest much time in it.

[Zachary Raber · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up a copy because I enjoy both the 60s period and prep school fiction. This was a 2-for-1 overlap.

A good portion of this was engaging. The recounting of the characters’ experiences at the small prestigious school were entertaining and well written. They felt like a nostalgic recounting of actual school experiences.

There isn’t much of a driving plot. And I find the swing as a main plot to be the least interesting part of the book. To me, it was most interesting when it felt like looking into a journal or overhearing someone’s unfiltered stories from a long lost time and place. I had a special interest because I enjoy the intersection of the sub genres, but to anyone else, it may not be that interesting.

The slew of names and ways characters are referred to was disorienting at times. I’d jot them down on a note so you don’t have to keep doubling back to remember who is who. Another critique is that almost every single character is somehow queer which makes it unrealistic and at times completely unconvincing. Some of the character’s interactions felt more like wishful thinking instead of purposeful and plausible.

Linger during the nostalgic bits and speed read the rest.