The Importance of School in Books
- The Mary Word
- Sep 15
- 6 min read
By Sabrina Whenman
Think about it, all those books you read as a primary schooler or even now where a teenager saves the world from a big bad villain, they were just that, a teenager. School is always important in these kinds of books—Harry Potter protects Hogwarts from Voldemort, Percy Jackson continues to struggle with his studies, and Sophie Foster (Keeper of the Lost Cities) discovers a new world on a school trip. I will therefore discuss how the genres of fantasy, middle grade, and young adult fiction, along with school-related tropes and themes, interact to create distinct cliches and subgenres, and how each portrays school differently.
To start, what is ‘middle grade’ and ‘teen’ or ‘young adult’ fiction? Middle grade, or junior fiction, encompasses books that are written for 8-12 year olds, which usually portray younger characters and centre around less complex themes and narratives compared to books written for older children. These books can be in a variety of genres, as middle grade is considered an age bracket not a genre. Some examples of books that fit in this genre are the Harry Potter series, the Percy Jackson series, Wonder, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Nevermoor, the Chronicles of Narnia and Matilda.
Young adult (also sometimes called teen fiction) is books written for 12-18 year olds. Some examples include Hunger games, Twilight, The Giver, The Fault in Our Stars, Divergent, The Perks of Being a Wallflower and His Dark Materials.
Middle grade books that centre around school come in a variety of genres, these can include fantasy, science fiction, contemporary, adventure, mystery and more. Young adult books that have a focus on school use similar genres but delve deeper into subgenres, often having stronger themes and focusing on upper grades and university as well as issues that come up later in childhood or when you become an adult.
Now that the introductions are complete, we can talk about the importance of school in the fantasy books of these age groups. School appears in a variety of ways such as the tropes and themes used or the overall plot.
When kids read books they often want to see themselves and their experiences in some way or another, and this can go two ways. The first way is when school turns into something more magical, a way to escape the boring reality of school and find a new world or introduce an interesting element to the environment. This is the fantasy side of this genre. The other way is a book showing how school actually feels, the ups and downs, the drama and just how it is to be a primary or high schooler. While the second option can appear with fantasy, I will be focusing mainly on the first part for this article because it’s more prominent in the fantasy genre.
Even within middle grade fantasy there are generally a few options. There can be an evil plot at the school which the kids are trying to solve, with a villain to defeat at the end of the year. Other times, the main characters have just arrived at a boring new school or the holidays, and suddenly they get swept away through a portal to explore and save another world.
Despite the paths these sorts of books follow, the core theme is still school. They might have to investigate an evil teacher trying to take down the school but they still have to finish their homework and study for a test. They could be off saving another world, fighting battles against evil monsters, but if they don’t get back to earth by the end of the holidays their parents will be mad. Another part of this is that it always fits into the school year. Characters can search for a whole year, only to fight in the last week and go home for the holidays. In a series this often plays out so that the character can defeat a new villain at the end of each year until they eventually graduate for the end of that section of school. (Note: We would say primary or high school but in American books this is usually the end of middle or high school.) When the events of a book happen during the holidays, characters go off for their school break and through a portal or to a magic summer camp where they can spend time with the other characters (who they can only see in this time) before they have to go back to school for the start of the year.
The main difference between these is the way school is perceived. When the main story happens during the school year it’s an event for characters to look forward to where they can get back to school and spend time with their friends. They get to go back to a world that they fit into, with magic and prophecies and evil plots. In books where the plot happens in the holidays, school is seen in a different light. Characters in these books usually face some sort of hardship at school or in the normal world. They’re being bullied, they struggle academically, they’re labeled as ‘troubled’ and get kicked out of schools or they’re not like the other kids, sometimes all of these at once. A similarity between books set in the year versus books set in the holidays is that readers can imagine that they’re there, whether it be at a magical school or off discovering new worlds while on break.
Young Adult books use the setting and themes of school in many
different ways and with more variety than Middle Grade does (though there are exceptions for both), this means that for this segment I’ll be comparing general differences between Young Adult and Middle Grade rather than just talking about Young Adult, I will also be calling it YA.
YA books that portray school show it very differently to middle grade ones. Where middle grade books let kids have fun trying to solve a mystery or learn about a new world with fairly low stakes, young adult books have darker, stranger and more threatening issues solved by older teenagers and young adults with higher stakes. School becomes darker and more sinister, which is where the dark academia sub genre comes in. Many middle grade fantasy novels are set in our world with small changes or some type of simple fairy tale world, young adults novels often scrap that all together. They will be set in fantastical worlds, with examples being: Versions of our world that have a whole new element of society such as magic that shapes the cultures, countries and governments, worlds that are as technologically advanced as ours but have made up locations and magic and fantastical elements introduced, or even just worlds that are almost like middle and high fantasy.
The schools are different too, in Middle Grade, kids get invited to magical schools that have the youngest kids being around 11-12 years old. In YA the ‘kids’ that go to these schools are usually much older, the youngest being 15-16 in some cases and a lot of the time they aren’t based around high school but rather university or college. In YA the characters have to fight and go through trials to get into these places, they put in years of work to get to specialised schools for magic or other fantastical things like dragon riding or becoming a librarian for magic books (that example may sound crazy, but I read a book centered around that a couple weeks ago named “A Sorcery of Thorns”). There is also a rise in Dark Academia which is a fantasy sub-genre that is usually written with YA or Adult ages in mind. It’s based around the romanticisation of classic literature and academia, gothic themes, and uses other genres like mystery to create a dark aesthetic. A lot of current books in the YA fantasy genre with school are using this subgenre as it becomes more popular and widely spread. Overall, YA books are just different in the way they portray school and while the plots are different the conventions for creating these books are so wide-spread that they show up in some way in most books of this genre. That’s all for the differences between YA and Middle grade for this article - there are definitely more, but these are just the key ones I wanted to point out.
Thank you to everyone for reading this, I definitely recommend you go read any of the books I mentioned (I haven’t read all of them but they’re meant to be good)! I hope everyone enjoyed reading this and has an amazing holidays, and happy Graduation to the Year 12’s!
Sources + Note:
So I was trying to do research on different definitions, examples and such but useful websites such as Goodreads, Penguin Random House and other professional, good sources have been blocked so while I did look at these websites on my phone a lot of the information about genres, age brackets and popular books are either from my mind or less suitable websites. Since I am unable to access these websites on my laptop I cannot provide links but I have looked at them on my phone (just google ‘examples of x genre’ or ‘definition of x’ and goodreads and other suitable sources should come up).
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