“Do you know what it took for Socrates’ enemies to make him stop pursuing the truth?”
“Hemlock.”
Storied, fiercely competitive Mariana Academy was founded with a serious honor code; its reputation has been unsullied for decades. Now a long-dormant secret society, Prisom's Party, threatens its placid halls with vigilante justice, exposing students and teachers alike for even the most minor infraction.
Iris Dupont, a budding journalist whose only confidant is the chain-smoking specter of Edward R. Murrow, feels sure she can break into the ranks of The Devil’s Advocate, the Party’s underground newspaper, and there uncover the source of its blackmail schemes and vilifying rumors. Some involve the school’s new science teacher, who also seems to be investigating the Party. Others point to an albino student who left school abruptly ten years before, never to return. And everything connects to a rare book called Marvelous Species. But the truth comes with its own dangers, and Iris is 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, deeply buried secrets, and the lifelong reverberations of losing someone you love. Following in the tradition of classic school novels such as A Separate Peace, Prep, and The Secret History, it reminds us how these years haunt our lives forever.
The Year of the Gadfly
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Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Part Dead Poet's Society. Part Heathers. Entirely addictive."
-Glamour
“Harrowing, enchanting, and utterly original.”
-Daily Beast
"A darkly comic romp...vivid and very enjoyable."
-Washington Post
"Engages and provokes."
—The Boston Globe
"There is a relentless authenticity in her prose...Miller effectively places here characters in a vice and squeezes the truth out of them."
—The Atlantic.com
"A smoldering mystery set in a New England prep school... The author skillfully ratchets up the tension as Iris (and the reader) finds it harder and harder to tell who the good guys are... A gripping thrill ride that’s also a thoughtful coming-of-age story."
-Kirkus Reviews
-O Magazine "A coming of age page-turner."
—Library Journal "Hysterical and moving, The Year of the Gadfly fuses Special Topics in Calamity Physics with Portnoy's Complaint for girls. This book is an imaginative delight."
—Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story "A dark, whirling, and compelling read. The Year of the Gadfly is a hilarious and heartbreaking story about friendship, acceptance, and trust — the way our search for them shapes our youth and how that search can haunt us forever."
—Jennifer Close, author of Girls in White Dresses "This novel has so much going for it: the feisty, heartbroken heroine, the ghost of Edward R. Murrow, and a fascinating love story between an albino girl and a gifted young scientist. In a brilliant portrayal of the dark underbelly of adolescence, Miller explores a time when both our identity and our future are at stake, and shows how rare it is to leave that landscape unscathed."
—Ann Napolitano, author of Within Arm's Reach and A Good Hard Look "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."
—David Ignatius, author of Bloodmoney "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!"
—Carol Goodman, author of The Lake of the Dead Languages and The Seduction of Water
About the Author
JENNIFER MILLER, author of Inheriting the Holy Land: An American’s Search for Hope in the Middle East, holds an undergraduate degree from Brown and graduate degrees in journalism and fiction from Columbia. Her work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Marie Claire, the Christian Science Monitor, the Daily Beast, Salon, and others. She is a native of Washington, D.C., and now lives in Brooklyn. This is her first novel.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
I'm a huge fan of Pat Conroy's "Lords of Discipline," which features many of the concepts successfully used by Jennifer Miller in "Year of the Gadfly": a flawed narrator, a tight-knit, elite school environment, authority figures of questionable honesty, and a series of unraveling secrets.
Miller actually has three flawed narrators, and they are all wonderfully original. To present them, Miller took on the enormous challenge of writing from two first-person perspectives in 2012 AND a third-person perspective from a character in 2000. So the story repeatedly shifts in perspective and time.
If it's confusing as I describe it - don't worry, because it is NOT confusing in the narrative. In fact, this imaginative decision is what takes the book a step ahead of most conventional fiction.
Miller's big risk pays off in an original and compelling structure that very much helps carry the story. I think the close, first-person connection enables a reader's deeper investment with multiple levels of the story, which is sometimes difficult when there's only one point of view. Even Miller's third-person narration is so tight that it's basically another first-person POV. The reader is very much in the story at all times, never disconnected or 'above it all.'
I felt invested with the characters and if I didn't directly 'identify' with them (like a 15-year-old girl), I cared about the decisions they made and the revelations of any personal details. Each character was fully-realized on the page.
This story features quite a lot of twists and turns, so to avoid spoilers I will avoid plot discussion. Really, it's not that important anyway - a reader will enjoy the story's mystery and a variety of revelations, but it's the characters that make the book succeed, for the reasons I mentioned.
The ending can often be an afterthought and let-down in character-driven fiction, but I was surprised how deftly Miller's conclusion came together. It didn't end with the easy choices I had expected.
No book's perfect - the 15-year-old girl seems a little too self-aware, and a 28-year-old teacher often behaves like a much older man. But, those are common flaws in a lot of fiction.
The first couple chapters might make this seem almost like a young-adult book, and I think high school students would appreciate it (it takes place in a private prep school), but it's very much an adult story that fans of "Lords," or "The Secret History" would also like.
I'm a fan of flawed and tragic narrators, and I like stories that successfully reach honest levels of melancholy, but NOT melodrama - "Gadfly" pulls it off. It's fun, and at the right times, sad.
Miller actually has three flawed narrators, and they are all wonderfully original. To present them, Miller took on the enormous challenge of writing from two first-person perspectives in 2012 AND a third-person perspective from a character in 2000. So the story repeatedly shifts in perspective and time.
If it's confusing as I describe it - don't worry, because it is NOT confusing in the narrative. In fact, this imaginative decision is what takes the book a step ahead of most conventional fiction.
Miller's big risk pays off in an original and compelling structure that very much helps carry the story. I think the close, first-person connection enables a reader's deeper investment with multiple levels of the story, which is sometimes difficult when there's only one point of view. Even Miller's third-person narration is so tight that it's basically another first-person POV. The reader is very much in the story at all times, never disconnected or 'above it all.'
I felt invested with the characters and if I didn't directly 'identify' with them (like a 15-year-old girl), I cared about the decisions they made and the revelations of any personal details. Each character was fully-realized on the page.
This story features quite a lot of twists and turns, so to avoid spoilers I will avoid plot discussion. Really, it's not that important anyway - a reader will enjoy the story's mystery and a variety of revelations, but it's the characters that make the book succeed, for the reasons I mentioned.
The ending can often be an afterthought and let-down in character-driven fiction, but I was surprised how deftly Miller's conclusion came together. It didn't end with the easy choices I had expected.
No book's perfect - the 15-year-old girl seems a little too self-aware, and a 28-year-old teacher often behaves like a much older man. But, those are common flaws in a lot of fiction.
The first couple chapters might make this seem almost like a young-adult book, and I think high school students would appreciate it (it takes place in a private prep school), but it's very much an adult story that fans of "Lords," or "The Secret History" would also like.
I'm a fan of flawed and tragic narrators, and I like stories that successfully reach honest levels of melancholy, but NOT melodrama - "Gadfly" pulls it off. It's fun, and at the right times, sad.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In "The Year of the Gadfly," Jennifer Miller describes the tribulations of fourteen-year old aspiring journalist Iris Dupont, who has limited social skills, speaks to the ghost of her "spiritual mentor," Edward R. Murrow, and is disconsolate over the loss of her best friend. Iris moves with her family from Boston to Nye, Massachusetts, where she will attend Mariana Academy, a New England prep school. Mariana is a pressure cooker of raging hormones, academic competitiveness, and teenage angst, but there is one bright spot--Iris's brilliant biology teacher, Jonah Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan is an entomologist and an expert on extremophiles--"extreme-loving microbes from which all life originates." Some of these creatures live in boiling water; others can survive after being frozen; and still others thrive under pressure "that would crush a Mack truck." Kaplan is a demanding educator who challenges his students to reject conformity and think creatively. Iris is fascinated with Kaplan who, like her, is an iconoclast with a hidden core of grief.
The author is an astute observer of adolescent misery. She understands the exaggerated emotions of high-school kids who must cope with sexual tension, peer pressure, and inflated parental expectations. If Miller had devoted her narrative to Jonah's unusual teaching style and Iris's transformation from a self-centered rebel to a more broad-minded and tolerant individual, "Gadfly" might have been more conventional but also more readable. Instead, the author gives each character alternating chapters; this turns out to be more distracting than entertaining. In addition, Miller moves back and forth in time, contrasting events in the present with those of 1999, when Jonah, his twin brother, Justin, and their classmates, Hazel and Lily, were all Mariana students at war with their parents and one another. Sadly, a tragic accident will break up this uneasy alliance and have long-lasting effects on the survivors.
Jennifer Miller is an intelligent writer who challenges us to stick with a busy plot that incorporates secret societies, weird initiations, mysterious deaths, "arcane, pseudo-intellectual pranks," long-hidden secrets and grudges, and regrets about the road not taken. Many pages are devoted to Lily, whose former home Iris now occupies. Lily was born with albinism, a rare genetic condition; she is desperate to fit in with her "normal" counterparts. Iris relates to Lily's feelings of isolation and eagerly snoops into her background.
"The Year of the Gadfly" is provocative, satirical, thought-provoking, and occasionally humorous. However, like the aforementioned extremophiles, this novel is too offbeat to strike a chord with the average reader. On the other hand, those who like original and daring works of fiction may be impressed with Miller's ambitious portrayal of young people who go off the rails with disastrous consequences.
The author is an astute observer of adolescent misery. She understands the exaggerated emotions of high-school kids who must cope with sexual tension, peer pressure, and inflated parental expectations. If Miller had devoted her narrative to Jonah's unusual teaching style and Iris's transformation from a self-centered rebel to a more broad-minded and tolerant individual, "Gadfly" might have been more conventional but also more readable. Instead, the author gives each character alternating chapters; this turns out to be more distracting than entertaining. In addition, Miller moves back and forth in time, contrasting events in the present with those of 1999, when Jonah, his twin brother, Justin, and their classmates, Hazel and Lily, were all Mariana students at war with their parents and one another. Sadly, a tragic accident will break up this uneasy alliance and have long-lasting effects on the survivors.
Jennifer Miller is an intelligent writer who challenges us to stick with a busy plot that incorporates secret societies, weird initiations, mysterious deaths, "arcane, pseudo-intellectual pranks," long-hidden secrets and grudges, and regrets about the road not taken. Many pages are devoted to Lily, whose former home Iris now occupies. Lily was born with albinism, a rare genetic condition; she is desperate to fit in with her "normal" counterparts. Iris relates to Lily's feelings of isolation and eagerly snoops into her background.
"The Year of the Gadfly" is provocative, satirical, thought-provoking, and occasionally humorous. However, like the aforementioned extremophiles, this novel is too offbeat to strike a chord with the average reader. On the other hand, those who like original and daring works of fiction may be impressed with Miller's ambitious portrayal of young people who go off the rails with disastrous consequences.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
After a tragic personal loss, Iris DuPont's parents decide she needs a change of scenery from Boston. Relocating to Nye, Iris matriculates at Mariana Academy, a New England prep school of "academic rigor and social prestige." Her family arranges to stay in the newly vacant home of the former headmaster of Mariana, Elliott Morgan. The Morgans' daughter, Lily, also attended Mariana. Iris settles into Lily's old room which is arranged just as she left it. Iris yearns to be a journalist, so naturally her first order of business is to join the school newspaper, the Oracle. Unfortunately, the paper's editor doesn't share her view of hard-hitting journalism. Investigating and writing the puff pieces she's assigned is just a cross she'll have to bear. It isn't long, however, before she realizes that all is not well at the idyllic Mariana Academy. Following a few harrowing incidents, she learns of a secret society dedicated to exposing students and faculty who don't adhere to the values of the school's founder, Charles Prisom. Named in his honor, they're known as Prisom's Party. The mythic group has its own underground newspaper, the Devil's Advocate. Soon Iris is embroiled in a mystery that leaves her unsure of who or what she can trust. Perhaps even the ghost of Edward R. Murrow is not as reliable as she once thought.
"The Year of the Gadfly" is told in two threads approximately thirteen years apart. The chapters alternate between time periods and points of view. The present features the points of view of Iris and her biology professor, Jonah Kaplan, who was also a former student at Mariana. The earlier time frame features Lily Morgan's point of view. Taken together, the threads unravel a compelling mystery.
Jennifer Miller has done an impeccable job of structuring and pacing what is a reasonably convoluted story. To her credit, she avoids blatant misdirection, clumsy foreshadowing, and other melodramatic flourishes. The story unfolds organically and authentically, revealing just enough at the right time. Whatever else can be said, it's a very intelligent story. The book also vividly portrays the trials and tribulations of adolescence (the need to belong, insecurity, the perplexing and misleading disparity between one's mental and emotional capacities). She does this in part with brilliant characterization. If Iris starts off a little too precocious, bordering on pretentious, she is soon reined in and settles into a sympathetic heroine. All the characters are fully realized and endowed with a flawed humanity that's utterly engaging.
"The Year of the Gadfly" is a tightly woven tale that is both entertaining and insightful. Any complaint or criticism that surfaced regarding the integrity of the plot was adeptly answered and dismissed by the book's conclusion. The story's execution is practically flawless.
"The Year of the Gadfly" is told in two threads approximately thirteen years apart. The chapters alternate between time periods and points of view. The present features the points of view of Iris and her biology professor, Jonah Kaplan, who was also a former student at Mariana. The earlier time frame features Lily Morgan's point of view. Taken together, the threads unravel a compelling mystery.
Jennifer Miller has done an impeccable job of structuring and pacing what is a reasonably convoluted story. To her credit, she avoids blatant misdirection, clumsy foreshadowing, and other melodramatic flourishes. The story unfolds organically and authentically, revealing just enough at the right time. Whatever else can be said, it's a very intelligent story. The book also vividly portrays the trials and tribulations of adolescence (the need to belong, insecurity, the perplexing and misleading disparity between one's mental and emotional capacities). She does this in part with brilliant characterization. If Iris starts off a little too precocious, bordering on pretentious, she is soon reined in and settles into a sympathetic heroine. All the characters are fully realized and endowed with a flawed humanity that's utterly engaging.
"The Year of the Gadfly" is a tightly woven tale that is both entertaining and insightful. Any complaint or criticism that surfaced regarding the integrity of the plot was adeptly answered and dismissed by the book's conclusion. The story's execution is practically flawless.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful read
This story is part coming-of-age and part mystery with elements of mean girls (raised to the fourth power). The mystery interestingly unfolds through three point of views. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Alexis
2.0 out of 5 stars
Confusing Disappointment
I have a soft spot for high school novels. None of them have bared any resemblance to my high school experience, but there's something about the melodrama that draws me in. Read more
Published 2 months ago by Mr. Bey
4.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Debut Novel
Compulsively readable! The book's setting is an exclusive private school in New England. Once a boarding school, it's now a day school, drawing the best and brightest from the... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Emmi331
5.0 out of 5 stars
PIERCING THROUGH THE FACADES TO FIND THE TRUTH
Set in a New England prep school, The Year of the Gadfly takes the reader into the very halls and dungeons of a school that prides itself on its honor code, yet seemingly maintains... Read more
Published 3 months ago by Laurel-Rain Snow "Rain"
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good
Boarding school books are some of my favorites. They almost always have interesting plots and characters. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Emily34
2.0 out of 5 stars
Well written but boring
Like other reviewers, I found the story lacked suspense. For a younger audience it may have been more entertaining but overall, it was just ok.
Published 4 months ago by EMC
2.0 out of 5 stars
The year of the gadfly
While looking for a good read, I was tempted into purchasing this book because of the comparison with Donna Tartt's The Secret History. I was very disappointed. Read more
Published 4 months ago by maryan polson
2.0 out of 5 stars
Obviously, indeed, a first novel
I ordered this because of a beguiling piece in the Southwest Airlines magazine about trying to market a first novel. Read more
Published 5 months ago by bulldog woman
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great book!
As a big fan of I Am Charlotte Simmons, I hoped the slightly similar setting would lead to a book I enjoyed just as much. I was not disappointed! Read more
Published 7 months ago by kjpugs
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lacked Suspense
I was really looking forward to reading this but found myself bored most of the time. The novel lacked suspense for me. It also read more like a book written for young adults. Read more
Published 8 months ago by cicadanymph
