Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. Plus it has pictures! And Tim Burton’s directing the movie.
Adopted Jane by Helen Fern Daringer. I loved this book as a kid, even though the title is a spoiler. She’s in an orphanage from age 3 to 10, although this book is mostly about how she visits families on the outside for one summer. It’s set around the year 1900. (Remember when you could say “the turn of the century” for that time?)
You mention Cider House Rules in your OP, but almost any John Irving book has a boarding school in there, somewhere. Well, maybe not all, but The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire certainly do. Probably another one or two that I’m not remembering.
nice genre choice, niche within a niche!
I certainly second the selection above of The Hole… yes it is gratuitous attempt to have keira knightly on screen as often as possible in rapidly degrading attire, but it is also a very good study of young adult relationships and surprised me at the depth of the suspense it created.
My other 2 reccomendations would be more along the classic lines,
Unman, Wittering & Zigo
and
If… (lindsay Anderson) - this is a must see, just splendid viewing.
John C. Wright’s astonishing Chronicles of Chaos series. I say “astonishing” because you’d think there was nothing original left to write about magical orphans in an English boarding school. You’d be wrong.
They Cage the Animals at Night is a true story of a boy who was raised part of the time in an orphanage. Suprised by Joy takes place partially in a boarding school and it is very good.
Seconded! Dahl’s mother must have been one of the mentally strongest people who ever lived.
Actually, Jane’s parents died when she was nine months old. She had no memory of them.
Fell, Fell Back, and Fell Down by M. E. Kerr
Hex Hall is another series-in-progress thats (sort of) boarding school - there’s significant action away from the school grounds in one of the books, IIRC.
I’m reading this now for the Forever Young Adult Book Club this month and it’s fantastic!
I think you mean Just William and that’s not set in a boarding school. Billy Bunter, more famously a comic strip, was by Frank Richards.
Those were mentioned in the OP, but you reminded me that M.E. Kerr’s novel Little Little (1981) was set in part at some kind of orphanage or boarding school for kids with special needs. I can’t remember exactly, but one of the main characters grew up in an institutional setting.
Incidentally, M.E. Kerr attended a boarding school herself in the 1940s, so I wouldn’t be surprised if some of her other books dealt with the subject.
Many years before Harry Potter was published, Diana Wynne Jones wrote “Witch Week”, set in a witches’ boarding school. It’s a wonderful book, with quite a different feel to the HP series. I would recommend it highly (along with her other YA fantasy books.
There’s also St. Clare’s by the same author, Enid Blyton. She was very popular in the UK as a kids author a while back, notsomuch nowadays as she’s rather un-PC in retrospect!
Definitely not set in the last thirty years but one I’d recommend is *Sons of Fortune *by Malcolm MacDonald. The third part of the World from Rough Stones family sage set in Victorian times it covers the period when the English boarding school as we know it (and recognise from so many other books) was just emerging from the old anarchic mold. The time of Arnold and the transformation of Rugby School post Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
The Swedish novel Ondskan, which was made into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name (and translated to Evil in English language markets) is really rather good.
Father Flannegan of Boys Town and it poor step…um, -brother I guess, Boy’s Ranch.
Life With Mother Superior by Jane Trahey was set in a convent boarding school. Later made into the hilarious movie “The Trouble With Angels,” starring Hayley Mills and Rosalind Russell, the book was reissued under that title.
Good Times Bad Times by James Kirkwood. Was it really 30 years ago that I read it in high school?
Coming in to recommend this! One of my favorite movies.