From NY Times bestselling and award-winning author Brendan Kiely, a stunning new novel that explores the insidious nature of tradition at a prestigious boarding school.

Prestigious. Effective. Privileged. This is Fullbrook Academy, at the very top prep college where background looms in the leafy branches over its brick walkways. However, many traditions upheld in its hallowed halls are profoundly harmful.

Jules Devereux just really wants to hold her head straight down, avoid interruptions, and get into the proper about Tradition university, so she may leave Fullbrook and its own old-boy social codes behind. She desires freedom, but ex-boyfriends and ex-best close friends are motivated to maintain her in place.

Jamie Baxter feels as though an imposter in Fullbrook, however the hockey scholarship that got him in has particular him an opportunity to get away his recent and fulfill the dreams of his parents and instructors, whose mantra bands in his ears: Don’t disappoint us.

When Jamie and Jules match, they recognize in one another a similar instinct for survival, but at a college where women in the pupil handbook are rated simply by their looks, athletes stack hockey pucks in dorm space home windows like notches on the bedpost, and school-sponsored dances push first 12 months girls out in to the evening with senior kids, the stakes for safe sex, real like, and true companionship couldn’t be larger.

As Jules and Jamie’s lives intertwine, as well as the pressures to try out by the rules and remain silent about the school’s secrets intensify, they see Fullbrook for exactly what it is. That tradition, a phrase Fullbrook hides behind, could be unappealing, even violent. Eventually, Jules and Jamie are confronted with the challenging question: can they stand jointly against classmates–and an institution–who believe they are able to do no incorrect?