A teenage girl, grieving the death of her best friend, becomes enmeshed in a secret society at her remote prep school.
Storied Mariana Academy was founded with a serious honor code, its reputation unsullied for decades. Now Prisom’s Party threatens its placid halls. A budding journalist whose only confidant is the chain-smoking specter of Edward R. Murrow, Iris Dupont knows that she can break into the ranks of The Devil’s Advocate, the Party’s underground newspaper, and there uncover the real source of its blackmail schemes and vilifying rumors. Some involve her favorite teacher, Mr. Kaplan. Others point to an albino student who left school abruptly, never to return. And everything connects to a rare book called Marvelous Species. But the truth is not without its own dangers, leaving Iris torn between her allegiances, her reporter’s instinct, and her own troubled past. The Year of the Gadfly is an exhilarating journey of double-crosses, long-buried secrets, and all the charge of adolescence, following in the footsteps of classic school novels like Prep and The Secret History, and reminding us how these years haunt our lives forever.
Professional Reviews
Gary Shteyngart
"Hysterical and moving, Jennifer Miller's debut fiction fuses Special Topics in Calamity Physics with Portnoy's Complaint for girls. This book is an imaginative delight."
David Ignatius
"It's hard to resist any novel whose young journalist heroine hallucinates that she's in conversation with Edward R. Murrow. But Jennifer Miller has also written a book with the feel of real life—part science experiment, part mystery story, part a coming-of-age narrative sorting out the truth about one's friends and enemies."
Carol Goodman
"Jennifer Miller is a writer of exceptional promise, with instincts that are equally astute for insight into character, innovative structure, memorable phrasing, and startling plot turns that compel the reader to read on. In The Year of the Gadfly, her literary gifts are on virtuoso display; readers will be drawn deeply into this narrative and never want to leave it!"
As deafness, illness, and demonic forces close in around him, Ludwig van Beethoven must summon his faith and genius to complete the Missa Solemnis—a sacred masterpiece he believes could bring divine light into a darkening world.
