THE ACADEMY OF SMOKE AND MIRRORS

The headmaster of a heavily indebted Jewish boarding school tries to save it from financial collapse in Troy and Parry’s novel.

Jeff Taylor puts out fires (both academic and financial) as headmaster of the Hampton Acres Hebrew Academy, or HAHA for short. He has written his resignation letter but hasn’t yet given it to Samantha Kleinman, the founder’s daughter and CEO. The school was built with unnecessary luxury, and it costs over $1 million a month to stay afloat; Taylor needs $50 million to pay debts and $20 million to keep the school open for two more years. The challenges are vast: HAHA is located in rural Georgia next to a hog farm, and the school is receiving bomb threats worded as song lyrics. The calls are hoaxes, and the students have dubbed the perpetrator “the hip-hop bomber.” But parents are worried, and Samantha (called Sammy) travels the world looking for potential students (“I’m doing it with smoke and mirrors,” she tells Jeff). With Sammy off in Kazakhstan, the school receives another bomb threat, but Jeff gets good news: Air Force One is being kept at an airport nearby, which means HAHA and the hog farm are under Secret Service protection. The school doesn’t have enough cash to make it to the end of the year, though, and Jeff needs some way to raise $3 million to last until graduation day. Troy and Parry’s lighthearted comic take on a boarding school gone wrong features zany characters with ridiculous human foibles, making the novel an enjoyable read. Inside the closed world of the school, which is global in scope but concerned only with itself, the authors deftly detail what the kids find hilarious and how the adults drive each other insane. Jeff has many variables to manage, and the way he moves from crisis to crisis is entertaining. Some of the supporting characters are underdeveloped, including Jeff’s girlfriend, Barbara, but the novel largely succeeds in balancing its large cast of characters.

A fun and lighthearted novel about a luxurious boarding school heading for disaster.