'The friendship that Harry, Ron, and Hermione cemented during their first year studying the magical arts at Hogwarts,' James writes, 'wasn’t too far off from what I was expecting from my own boarding school life.' Alamy My expectations were high, and I was not open for follow-up questions or revisions. No matter where you went, as long as you were leaving home, you were in for something special-especially where friendship was concerned. I saw the same in my future, puncture wounds and all. Trinian’s, a mid-century British series of books and films that I discovered sometime in middle school, were constantly up to one wild scheme after another that always left them closer than ever before, even if someone suffered a very unfortunate archery accident to get there.

Sarah Crewe’s life in A Little Princess had its share of strife, but in the end she and her maid and confidante, Becky, emerge wealthy and friends for life. As a World War II–obsessed tween, I’d devoured Spying on Miss Müller, a YA novel about students at a British boarding school who suspected their teacher was a German spy and banded together to flush her out. I had always preferred the boarding school setting of Little Men to the original Little Women. Fourteen years of New Jersey friendships be damned.Įverything I’d read and heard about boarding school reinforced this. It seemed obvious to me that friendships made at boarding school would be the most intense, magical, meaningful, and, most important, solid friendships of my lifetime. Over the course of my childhood, I read hundreds of pages on the boarding school experience-and they hadn’t even all been Harry Potter, though the friendship that Harry, Ron, and Hermione cemented during their first year studying the magical arts at Hogwarts wasn’t too far off from what I was expecting from my own boarding school life.

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