Attending a dream school with Blake Nelson
My dream school was sometimes Notre Dame, sometimes any one of those fabled and famous former girls schools in New England. (And sometimes it was the University of Hawaii but I think everyone wishes for that one at least once.) The reality was a school in my hometown and living with my mother and stepfather for the first three years of college which meant that until I was 20, life was pretty much the same as it was when I was 16. In retrospect, I would have done things differently but back then I didn't have anything other than big expensive dreams of distant schools that were as unreal to me as Oz or Wonderland. I didn't know enough about them to really know how to get to them and honestly I didn't know enough to even know if they were reasonable choices for me. They were just dreams and still remain so even today.
In Dream School author Blake Nelson sends his college freshman Andrea Marr off to Wellington College in CT, the place she believes will be life changing. The reality, of course, is not nearly as dazzling but Nelson doesn't stack the deck with outrageous events; he lets Andrea's school experience unfold in ways relatively dull and ordinary. She makes friends, takes classes, dates, parties and tries to figure out who she is and who she wants to be. Disillusionment with Wellington creeps in slowly as she forms a disconnect with some of her classmates and instructors but Nelson lets the reader slowly work out if Andrea is the problem, or if the school is. Nothing is obvious, not even the sudden crushing issue that turns Andrea's world upside down in a moment.
Everything in Dream School, even the more outlandish moments, will seem familiar to anyone who ever attended college. (Parts of it are so familiar they seem almost eerie.) More than anything else though it is Andrea, with her sometimes naive, sometimes arrogant perspective, that makes the novel sing. She is equal parts confident and terrified, bubbling with eagerness one moment and desperate to hide another. In other words, she is very nearly every teenager in the first excited moments of leaving home. (Remember that stunning moment when Rory gets told she might not be cutting it in Yale? That is Andrea every step of the way.)
Dream School worked for me because it is as messy as life, because it doesn't shy away from the issues of drugs, alcohol and sex that every teen faces when they are out on their own and because Andrea is neither preternaturally smart nor eye-rollingly stupid. I loved this kid, even when she screwed up. I know her, I understand her and there are certainly moments (after I finally left home) when I was her. This is a great summer read - I'll have more about it in my formal review in the column this November.
