School books

Last week I started reading Paul Murray's amazing Skippy Dies, which I recommend to just about anybody who likes, well, just about anything. Putatively the story of an Irish boarding school and its extremely varied group of boys and faculty, Skippy starts off with a bang -- the boy in the title dying in a donut-eating contest with another student -- and then powers backward, upward, sideways and down through life at the school, including but not limited to bullying, Ritalin-snorting, 11th dimension astrophysics and true love. If I had to compare it to anything, I guess I'd pick David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, although Skippy is far more accessible, and definitely funnier.

This weekend, though, I gladly set it aside for a book that I've been waiting even longer for -- also set in a school.



Michael Northrop's new novel Trapped is his second book, after the amazing Gentlemen. Northrop is the real deal -- I can't tell what I like more, his stories, or the narrative voice he uses to tell them, a so-true-you-can-hear-it-whispering-from-the-back-of-the-classroom first-person tour guide to the darkest and sometimes funniest aspects of the American Teenage Nightmare.

In Trapped, Northrop takes us fast and deep into the lives of seven teenagers held captive in a New England high school besieged by a winter blizzard so powerful it sounds like something out of Revelations -- that's on page 2. I knew from the moment I opened the book that I was going to love it. Here's Northrop's narrator in the novel's second paragraph:

"It was the day the blizzard started, and it didn't stop for nearly a week. No one had seen anything like it....It wasn't a storm; it was whatever comes after that."

I love Northrop's books, not just because he's obviously gifted at telling compelling, mega-suspenseful stories with characters that I instantly care about, but because they remind me of how damn excited I was to read YA back when I was a young adult -- that slightly subversive feeling that I got when I realized that I was in the hands of a legitimate, no-brakes storyteller who wasn't going to let me go until he'd finished. Without even breaking a sweat, Trapped harkens back to the days when every good book genuinely seemed to leave me a changed person -- my skull buzzing with voices, stories, ideas and visuals that hadn't ever occupied real estate there before.

As a sidebar, I have to mention that in this day of e-books and Kindles and iPad's, Trapped is just a gorgeously designed book, and deserves to be picked up on that feature alone. Northrop talks here about designer Phil Falco's genius work (he also did the cover for Gentlemen) and the way it grabs you right off the shelf.

Do yourself a favor, remind yourself how it first felt to be gripped by a novel, and pick up a copy ASAP.