Welcome to Tiffin Academy! Fear not that you didn’t get into either of the Philipses (Exeter or Andover) or any of the Saints (Paul, Mark, Andrew). Tiffin’s star is on the rise --- quite literally. Much to the surprise of other similar private schools, as well as Tiffin’s Head of School herself, Audre Robinson, the new boarding school rankings have just come out. Tiffin has ascended to second place from 19 the previous year!

It’s an incredible coup, and one that Audre doesn’t want to think about too much. Could it be due to pressure (or bribes) from the President of the school’s Board of Directors, Jesse Eastman, as payback for taking on his wayward 19-year-old son, Andrew “East” Eastman? Audre felt at the time that taking on East was making a deal with the devil. He already had been kicked out of the finest preps schools in New York City and the greater tri-state area. And if the school wanted to keep the influx of his father’s cash flowing, the administration would look the other way at his son’s “laissez-faire” attitude towards his studies.

Other more jealous educators with axes to grind have been so bold as to suggest that Tiffin’s rise in the rankings is due to having more diversity, specifically Audre, a woman of color, in charge. She’d hate to think that was the reason. Despite her reservations, she truly loves Tiffin and has fought hard to make it a more progressive place for students to learn and thrive. 

"[Hilderbrand and Cunningham] create a wonderfully salacious and fun world, one that we hope will become a series. Perfect for cozy fall reading lists, it will engage and delight readers who want a side of scandal with their school tales."

Of course, there is the pall of Fifth-Form Cinnamon Peters’ tragic suicide that occurred last spring and still hangs over the school like a spectre. She was such a bright, involved social girl. How could that happen here? And how did no one, Audre included, see the warning signs? But because of the space left by Cinnamon's sad absence, Charlotte “Charley” Hicks, a hardworking student from Towson, Maryland, is granted last-minute admission for the fall semester. And not a minute too soon. Charley’s dad passed away a few years ago, and her mom has since remarried Joey, her late twenty-something employee at her landscaping business.

Charley cannot stand Joey and is pretty sure he hit on her best friend, Beatrix. She sees getting into Tiffin as divine intervention --- her great escape --- but that doesn’t mean she’s going to turn into one of these private boarding school types. Charley is more at home in her room reading Patricia Highsmith than figuring out how to tap a keg. She definitely doesn’t want to become like Davi Banerjee, her classmate and TikTok wunderkind, who already has over one million followers all eager to watch her latest “Get Ready W/ Me” videos. In fact, Charley is pretty sure that Davi’s life is not all Instagrammable sunsets and nights out as she portrays.

Among the Fifth-Form students, there’s the throuple known as Hakeem/Taylor & Dub. At least, they didn’t start out as a throuple. Hakeem and Taylor were a couple, with close friend Dub, who was in mourning over his girlfriend, Cinnamon, gratefully third-wheeling it with them. But after a while, Hakeem discovers that Taylor has feelings for Dub, complicating their tenuous dynamic, especially since both Hakeem and Dub are on the school’s football team. And of course, there’s Andrew “East” Eastman, the troubled party boy who may or may not be the reason for the school’s recent meteoric rise in the rankings. East is taken with Charley, who’s so unlike the rest of these materialistic, shallow girls. But can Charley trust him, or is he just using her to get what he wants? 

If you think all the drama occurs just between the students, you’d be dead wrong. There’s enough going on with Tiffin’s faculty and staff to provide storylines for a soap opera.

Director of Admissions Cordelia Spooner is having a covert affair with College Counselor Honey Vandermeid, although it’s a pretty open secret to most of the staff at this point. Still, Cordelia finds Honey pulling away now that the semester has started, unlike the blissful days of summer they just spent, with the campus basically to themselves. Two new green teachers have joined the ranks this year: Simone Bergeron, the Canadian twenty-something who teaches History, and Rhode Rivera, the former hot-shot novelist who now teaches English. It’s clear to most everyone that Rhode has a crush on Simone, but her romantic longings are leading her elsewhere --- and with someone a bit more scandalous. There is never a dull moment at Tiffin!

THE ACADEMY is the first collaborative outing for bestselling author Elin Hilderbrand, who is known for her heartfelt Nantucket-set beach reads, and her daughter, Shelby Cunningham, herself a graduate of St. George’s School in Middletown, Rhode Island. Hilderbrand’s love of novels like A SEPARATE PEACE and PREP, combined with Cunningham’s real-life boarding school knowledge, have allowed them to create a wonderfully salacious and fun world, one that we hope will become a series. Perfect for cozy fall reading lists, it will engage and delight readers who want a side of scandal with their school tales.

And for those seeking school nostalgia, they’ll find that “All 239 of us (240, if we include Levi Volpere at his family home in Annandale) suspect that we’ll look back at our time at Tiffin Academy and tell anyone who asks that these were the best days of our lives” and that reading THE ACADEMY is time well-spent.