" This is the story of a group of boys growing up in an all boys boarding school in Connecticut just before WWII starts. It portrays the casual cruelty of these adolescent years, the yearning for acceptance, the sudden turns of fate. At the same time, Yates sheds a light on the closed community of the faculty. Dorset Academy, founded by an idiosyncratic old woman who always wanted to be a boy, is a place for misfits and oddities...a "funny" school, and a "good" school in the sense that it allowed this generation of boys to retain a lot of their innocence before heading off to war. As they graduate, the school closes and the war begins, signalling an end to innocence both for the boys and for the country. "
— Sharonm, 1/18/2014