The Academy

Elin Hilderbrand is the grande dame of the seasonal novel — the writer who understands that place can be plot — and here, in collaboration with Shelby Cunningham, she takes that sensibility into new terrain. The Academy is not her usual Nantucket confection. It’s a prestige-world, high-pressure story about closed-door privilege — and how cruelty thrives when the rules are implied rather than spoken.

What’s interesting is how the book balances the breeziness of a Hilderbrand read (clean dialogue, quick turns, delicious micro-observations about class and taste) with something sharper and darker. The academy in question is less a school than a crucible: hierarchies baked into architecture, alliances that calcify into mini-empires, and adults who mistake institutional legacy for moral authority.

The novel is very aware of the zeitgeist: the world’s appetite for stories about the elite — but this isn’t just a catalogue of decadence. It’s about systems: how ambition becomes corrosive when the parameters of success are unexamined, and how the young often replicate the power abuses of the old without even noticing they’re doing it.

Is it still addictive? Absolutely. These authors know how to move a scene — and how to seed just enough intrigue at the end of a chapter that your dinner burns in the oven because you’re still “just finishing this one part.” The pacing is sly. The romance threads are calibrated, not perfunctory. The betrayals come with genuine sting.

If anything falters, it’s the occasional smoothing-over of emotional fallout — the story sometimes resets too quickly after a rupture. But perhaps that’s part of the design: in elite worlds, damage is not repaired — it’s repressed.