Books book reviews Boarding School Trouble and Trauma: Spoiled Milk by Avery Curran Alexis Ong reviews “a must-read for boarding school fiction junkies.” By Alexis Ong | Published on March 23, 2026 Comment 0 Share New Share If figure skating is competitive gender performance, then all-girls boarding school is a godless pageant where gender isn’t so much a rehearsed performance but an endless clown car of ordeals. Enid Blyton’s boarding school books—hello, St. Clare’s and Malory Towers—were a formative part of my preteen reading, and it is through this cloying miasma of midnight feasts and social grooming and stiff-upper-lip camaraderie that I went off to real girls boarding school where it became immediately obvious that Enid Blyton was full of shit. But that’s the beautiful thing about this very specific subgenre: If done well, it’s wholly transportive for the right reader. It can revive a powerful sense of escapist nostalgia for a time when these stories—trite and absurd (and in Blyton’s case, sometimes problematic) as they are to contemporary eyes—actually made you feel something.  Avery Curran’s debut, Spoiled Milk, is one of those books. The novel follows the recollections of Emily Locke, a precocious sixth-form student at Briarley, a small rural boarding school for girls in the late 1920s. It is with slight trepidation and sick glee that my eyes soak up the words “Church of England” and immediately flash back to the pastoral foundations of my own Anglican education—the smell of wet wool, cold chapel pews, our stone replica of Caedmon’s Cross that traveled from the bowels of North Yorkshire to Australia—because now Spoiled Milk is personal. Emily, though, loves Briarley. Hers is a tiny, tight-knit class—just six seniors—overflowing with all the hormonal neuroses and messy politics that drive teens at this age. Things start to spiral when Emily’s best friend Violet dies in a suspicious fall; Emily is convinced that the young French teacher, Mademoiselle, is the murderer. Cue foul omens like worm-riddled fruit, bad well water, and hallucinations. The girls visit the village medium, who gives them an ominous warning that some inexorable thing is coming.  I was initially wary of Spoiled Milk in that stupid soliloquial way where any story that overlaps with personal experience is always going to chafe against petty indignance and righteous exceptionalism; at one point my most petulant thought was, “these girls aren’t nearly shitty enough to each other,” as if there’s some real-life yardstick for “realistic” teenage spite. I sulked at Emily’s insights, either because she was being impossibly mature or because she reminded me of my high school’s interpersonal dynamics. This is, of course, a me problem, but getting jumpscared by these childish ancient feelings after 25 years felt like a weird meta bonus, given the themes and setting of the book.  Buy the Book Spoiled Milk Avery Curran Buy Book Spoiled Milk Avery Curran Buy this book from: AmazonBarnes and NobleiBooksIndieBoundTarget Curran takes time to establish the ritual and detail that this subgenre demands, because elaborate formalities and careful hierarchies are a defining part of the English institutional atmosphere. Generally speaking, this whole domain is an age-old petri dish of racist, sexist, classist monstrosities that rely on rather homogenous tropes. At best, it can be a magical realm where children are free to discover their inner potential among peers; at worst, it’s a grooming pit designed to sustain conservatism, trauma, and abuse. Armed with a strong understanding of this rich and miserable history, Curran injects fresh blood into the traditionally rigid paradigms of English girlhood narratives.  There’s a lot to parse in this book about gender and queerness and the dynamics of young women packed away like uniformed sardines; Curran taps into every trope and stereotype about boarding school girls while largely avoiding flat cliches. There is the idea that girls are meaner to each other than boys, wielding microdoses of spite and cruelty like a thousand hidden needles; there are countless shows and books and films about the complex cruelty and sociopathy of teen girls who play the long game. There is the age-old trope of Schrödinger’s lesbians, that an all-girl community must be a hothouse for sapphic deviance, and one can only really tell if one actually wants to look. It was hard for my mind not to drift toward Sophia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides; we have our very own Lux Lisbon in the form of Violet, whom everyone at Briarley is obsessed with.  It is this peer fixation and competitive infatuation that jumped out at me: the all-encompassing strain of teenage limerence that defines so much of high school. It was a huge part of my own experience, watching friends and enemies alike attach themselves to popular girls on a chaotic spectrum of queer desire and coming-of-age crushes—platonic and romantic—that seem to evaporate after graduation. Emily’s observations run from petty and childish, critical but peppered with self-doubt, to jarringly honest and relatably impatient; Curran does a great job of balancing the staid atmosphere of a period drama with a protagonist who stays sharp and light and appropriately stubborn and myopic (we’ve all been there). Everything about Emily is urgent and fierce in her hardheadedness, lending a useful momentum to the narrative; Emily’s friends are, in comparison, the voices of reason to her dogged need for answers. Then, of course, there’s prim, obnoxious Evelyn, the object of Emily’s disdain, who of course, evolves into something more. As for the spiritualist themes of the book, this is also something we did in my first year of boarding school, although ours was just a Ouija board scrawled on a sheet of A4 paper and a coin for a planchette. I can only say that had I been alive during the 1920s in an all-girls boarding school with superstition and religious hysteria coming out of the walls, I would have found new ways to scare myself to death (complimentary) on the regular. Curran mostly keeps the supernatural elements of the story loose, focusing on the core group of friends; the idea of a Scooby-Doo ride-or-die squad was such a huge selling point of Enid Blyton’s stories for young me, at least before I was rudely shoved into a reality where I had to line up in a single file to go to dinner. This is the sort of story that would sink under the weight of over-exposition—the subtle fantasy of camaraderie in a place that actively worked to diminish it—and honestly the less we know about why and how Briarley became a bodysnatchers-style epicenter of eldritch terror, the better. At first blush, Spoiled Milk might feel like it offers neat analogies to teenhood and queerness and growing up: a story about a tortured, forced farewell to childhood and order. There is a lot to unpack about everything—Englishness, gender, western civilization, sexuality, patriarchy, class, and so on—but few concrete answers. There is nothing neat and clean about Emily’s journey, and there shouldn’t be. Later on in the book, Emily becomes a little more concerned with the end of England, or the world, but Curran keeps our focus on this small microcosm of terror to great claustrophobic effect. My biggest personal takeaway was how much Spoiled Milk made me reflect on my own experiences with (all of the things above) on a larger scale, and how well Curran’s style engages with the reader’s own history; it feels strikingly like a conversation, perhaps even a confession, that resonates with the present. It is a refreshingly self-aware debut, built on a rich tradition of gothic cultural capital as well as history, and a must-read for boarding school fiction junkies.[end-mark] Spoiled Milk is published by Doubleday. The post Boarding School Trouble and Trauma: <i>Spoiled Milk</i> by Avery Curran appeared first on Reactor.