THE NINE

A sinister secret lies behind the pristine facade of an elite New Hampshire boarding school in this novel.      

Welcome to Dunning Academy, where today’s best young minds and upper-crust legacies are molded into tomorrow’s movers and shakers—if the academic and social pressures don’t break them first. When 14-year-old Sam Webber received his acceptance, his mother, Hannah, was overjoyed. Sam was the miracle baby she and her husband, Edward, thought they would never have, and from the moment of his birth, he became the center of his mother’s life. Dunning was her idea—Sam would receive a superior education and make the important connections that would lead to a successful life. But now, he is on his own, insecure and struggling (“He realized something during those first weeks it would take his mother a long time to understand: the only way he was going to master Dunning Academy would be through a side door”). That door is provided by Justin Crandall, a legacy golden boy, who befriends Sam and offers him a chance to join The Nine, Dunning’s secret society (think Yale’s Skull and Bones for the high school set). Gradually, as he is pulled more deeply into The Nine’s web, Sam comes to realize that the society’s ostensibly harmless pranks are being manipulated by others with malevolent agendas. Woven throughout the disturbing, plot-driven narrative is a poignant mother-son drama, with Hannah’s obsessive commitment to Sam’s Ivy League track causing a fracturing in their relationship. In fluid prose, Blasberg (Eden, 2017) combines two tales through two alternating voices. The third-person narrator provides the major storyline, in which decades-old misdeeds are resurrected through current schemes and blackmail, while Hannah delivers the subplot through first-person, emotional recollections. While Sam is an appealing lead character, readers will likely find Hannah’s intransigence frustrating. But ultimately, she faces the fact that her own ambitions for Sam left him vulnerable to the machinations of more experienced players: “I used to take it for granted that our desires were intertwined. I assumed he’d absorbed them in utero, just as he shared my blood and my oxygen.”

A helicopter mom turns out to be no match for a well-funded conspiracy; engaging, with a likable young protagonist.