What is up is sex at boarding school. Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, the women in the photograph, have written a book called Restless Virgins a non-fiction pseudonymous exposé of life at Milton Academy. The review evokes a number of other stories about sex, boarding school, and adolescence that have been floating through the public consciousness in the last few years. Curtis Sittenfield’s Prep, a fictionalized account was the first of this genre of modern boarding school stories. A number of copycats followed; many never made it to a publisher but were passed around at boarding schools all the same. Kaavya Viswanathan’s ill-fated (and wrongly-accused, but that’s another story altogether) book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life is not about boarding school, but shares many of the same attributes, being about affluent students at an elite public school who are obsessed with college admissions. (The original title of Viswanathan’s book was How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got In.) And then Milton had an all-too-real story of their own as a scandal erupted over sex involving underage students. Meanwhile articles like this one in the Globe and one in the New York Times Sunday Magazine a few months ago have added volume to the discussion. Despite the exertions of the media on this matter, I can’t help but point out that this is simply a limited (albeit interesting) portrait of boarding school life. I haven’t read any of these books, but from some of the more calm reviews, it seems that in many cases the media’s reviews are simply a limited (albeit interesting) portrait of the books.

Two years ago, before Prep was published, the most well-known books about boarding school (Harry Potter aside—I’m talking about real boarding schools) were A Separate Peace and Death Be Not Proud. These books, both of them idyllic, tragic portraits of New England oases in the midst of the Second World War, have largely shaped American images of boarding school for two generations, for better or worse. And yet a moment’s reflection tells us that only a few mid-century schoolboys could have actually lived such idyllic, tragic lives.

Sure, will come the answer, but doesn’t even this limited portrait have a more fundamental message about our culture? Probably. A Separate Peace is certainly an eloquent piece of art about the national psyche at the low point of the Second World War. But that doesn’t mean it is a particularly accurate portrayal of life at boarding school.