I liked The Academy, a new boarding-school novel with an interesting first-person plural narration, so I was excited to read the sequel, The Thoroughbreds, set at the same school the next year. Unfortunately, even the fun name-dropping of the assigned texts in the students’ boarding school lit class couldn’t save this novel from falling flat.

Over the course of The Thoroughbreds, there are so many dramatic events. There’s a 7 million dollar loss on an accidental crypto investment, a drug-fueled orgy that burns down a building, a teen pregnancy, an affair between a married man and his daughter’s classmate, and so much more… but it’s a weirdly boring and unsatisfying novel because nothing has any effects for these characters. Everything resets like an old sitcom, whether that’s an affair getting out (no one cares), dramatic family announcements (a second dramatic announcement cancels it out!), an accidental pregnancy, anything. There are some lower-stakes changes with school staffing, but that also all resets.

We revisit a certain ex-teacher from The Academy, and while I wasn’t particularly invested in her storyline in the first one, I was pleased that anyone in the entire Tiffin Academy world was facing any consequences of their decisions. It’s not that I wanted characters to face punishments as much as I wanted their choices and actions to have meaning. (This teacher reveals loads of school secrets to a student whose stated goal is making sure the others don’t get anyway with anything, but then the student doesn’t follow through, so there are no consequences from this phone call, either.) One girl student gets expelled, I guess? But she just joined the academy for senior year so it’s not particularly dramatic or impactful, we know she’s already left another private school, and we next meet her on spring break with her Brearley friends.

The real joy for me in reading school novels is the coming-of-age story. Stories, plural, since there’s often a class or a friend group at the heart of a good school novel. The young people in The Thoroughbreds don’t seem to grow or change much. On one level, you want the high-school romances to stay together and you want students accepted into their dream schools, but there’s a stagnancy in fiction without struggle or the possibility of failure. Characters need struggles and setbacks to grow, and that’s a crucial part of a coming-of-age story.

The weird lack of consequences for any mistakes works as a comment on privilege because yes, the Thoroughbreds are exactly the social class who lose $7 million but it’s OK because they took a bribe from the right parents. But it’s not compelling reading to have hugely dramatic events that lead to nothing, over and over.