Title: Deadly Little Lessons
Author: Danielle Valentine
Date: September 15, 2026
Publisher: Putnam
ISBN: 978-0-593-86041-0
Quote: "[A]ll students will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement..."
For some writers and publishers in the "dark academia" genre, the goal is to build a perception that higher education attracts unpleasant people, makes people unpleasant, because wanting to qualify for "better" jobs than the proletariat is a bad thing. I'm not sure that that's the intention of this novel but there is a clear suggestion that depriving students of cell phones is something sadistic teachers do when they want to prevent students from telling anyone how extreme their sadistic "teaching methods" have become.
There's also that trope I hate where the girl only thinks she hates the obnoxious boy because she's really attracted to him. I hate that because it feeds into a belief, which teenaged girls don't need, that girls can't find or won't really want to find boyfriends who aren't obnoxious; that girls don't really mind obnoxious behavior because they just want male attention, any attention from any male, any time; that if boys were likable as friends they'd be unattractive as potential mates. None of this is true.
So, as an adult, I don't approve of this novel. My inner teenager remembers the atmosphere at a school where new students were told, "Look at the person on your right. Look at the person on your left. Look at the person in front of you. Only one of the four of you will be here next year," and thinks that Danielle Valentine got that right, anyway. Some attempts to motivate students do have emotionally toxic effects.
Lia and her foster sister Scarlett think they want to get into a prep school called Luminary that guarantees them admission to the college of Lia's choice. Lia believes it's the school where her parents met, before her father blew up a building and inadvertently killed her mother. This turns out not to be her "real" origin story but she's working with it most of the way through the book. Luminary has a beautiful, scenic, rural campus and offers comfortable beds and palatable food. It also piles on the homework for challenging courses. It also uses high-tech, creatively sadistic assignments and tests to motivate the students. Most of the students appear to be injured or killed. Nobody knows for sure whether they're recovering from injuries in the basement, or worse. The students know for sure when a boy who violated the rule about keeping a phone or, worse, trying to make a private phone call, has the bones in his hand cracked with a mallet.
Will the ones who've survived to that point in the term be able to work together to escape from Luminary, despite the armed guards patrolling its walls? Without spoiling the ending, I will say that Lia's willingness to trust a police officer who's arrested her for routine delinquency will serve her well.
I found this an unpleasant story about unpleasant people in unpleasant situations. That's what some teenagers look for, and of course, a moment of thought about how far-fetched the whole story is does make it funny--though I don't think the author or characters are aware that it's funny. As a piece of controlled subversion, an entertaining school story in which the school has to be worse than the one where the intended reader is reading the story, "Deadly Little Lessons" will do.
There's also that trope I hate where the girl only thinks she hates the obnoxious boy because she's really attracted to him. I hate that because it feeds into a belief, which teenaged girls don't need, that girls can't find or won't really want to find boyfriends who aren't obnoxious; that girls don't really mind obnoxious behavior because they just want male attention, any attention from any male, any time; that if boys were likable as friends they'd be unattractive as potential mates. None of this is true.
So, as an adult, I don't approve of this novel. My inner teenager remembers the atmosphere at a school where new students were told, "Look at the person on your right. Look at the person on your left. Look at the person in front of you. Only one of the four of you will be here next year," and thinks that Danielle Valentine got that right, anyway. Some attempts to motivate students do have emotionally toxic effects.
Lia and her foster sister Scarlett think they want to get into a prep school called Luminary that guarantees them admission to the college of Lia's choice. Lia believes it's the school where her parents met, before her father blew up a building and inadvertently killed her mother. This turns out not to be her "real" origin story but she's working with it most of the way through the book. Luminary has a beautiful, scenic, rural campus and offers comfortable beds and palatable food. It also piles on the homework for challenging courses. It also uses high-tech, creatively sadistic assignments and tests to motivate the students. Most of the students appear to be injured or killed. Nobody knows for sure whether they're recovering from injuries in the basement, or worse. The students know for sure when a boy who violated the rule about keeping a phone or, worse, trying to make a private phone call, has the bones in his hand cracked with a mallet.
Will the ones who've survived to that point in the term be able to work together to escape from Luminary, despite the armed guards patrolling its walls? Without spoiling the ending, I will say that Lia's willingness to trust a police officer who's arrested her for routine delinquency will serve her well.
I found this an unpleasant story about unpleasant people in unpleasant situations. That's what some teenagers look for, and of course, a moment of thought about how far-fetched the whole story is does make it funny--though I don't think the author or characters are aware that it's funny. As a piece of controlled subversion, an entertaining school story in which the school has to be worse than the one where the intended reader is reading the story, "Deadly Little Lessons" will do.
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