Review: "Briarcliff Prep" by Brianna Peppins

Briarcliff Prep by Brianna Peppins
Published November 2022 via Disney Hyperion
★★★

It's Avi's freshman year, and she's ready for the challenge—three of her siblings are already at Briarcliff, her mother went there as a student as well, and Avi's determined to not just live up to the family name but to shine on her own as well. I (predictably) wouldn't have minded less focus on romance, but I love that Avi and her friends are all bound and determined to excel academically as well.

Briarcliff Prep takes the reader into the semi-fictional world of historically black boarding schools (HBBSs), and I am in love with the concept. HBBSs do exist, but these days in vanishingly small numbers, and Peppins has mixed something like a (historically white) New England prep school with her own experience at a historically black college (HBCU) to come up with Briarcliff Prep.

Two things I had a hard time with: first, working out the target audience. Avi's a freshman, roughly fourteen years old, which puts the book in something of a grey area between middle grade and YA—if she were in middle school, this would definitely be MG, but YA leans towards characters who are closer to sixteen. Avi's well in line with a fourteen-year-old, but we also get a fair amount of action from her seventeen-year-old sister, Belle, and between that (and romance) and the more YA cover, I'm guessing this is aimed at a more YA audience. Second, the lack of supervision at this boarding school—even before reading the author's note at the end, I was pretty sure that she hadn't been to boarding school herself, because the casualness with which Avi and her friends visit the dorms at the boys' school across the street, or go off campus, does not compute to the part of my brain that still remembers all the rules I had to follow at my relatively liberal boarding school back in the day. Quite late in the book, we learn that girls can't be in boys' rooms with the door closed, but even that seems wildly liberal to me (and I'm not exactly conservative). It's a liability thing—most students are underage, the school is in loco parentis, and their goal is to reduce the chances of kids getting in trouble and thus the school getting in trouble with parents. And a boarding school student giving his girlfriend his spare key (172)...? Who gives a boarding school student a spare key in the first place? You get one, unless you lose it, and then you probably pay for a replacement. That and some other things (like a teacher letting a tenth-grader TA "jump in" to teach the class for forty minutes) make me think that there's too much reliance on college experience here and not enough consideration for the differences between college and high school life (and rules).

All that said: the concept here is so strong, and I'd love to see something like this expanded into a light series of shorter books for middle grade or early YA readers. There are so many of that sort of series written for, presumably, a predominantly white audience, but far, far fewer books designed to let young Black (or BIPOC) readers imagine themselves within the pages.