THE TRAGEDY PAPER, by Elizabeth Laban

The Tragedy Paper is a boarding school novel with a slightly new twist.  We are still reading about the rich and privileged, but we see a little suffering enter their world.  The story is told through the lens of a senior English assignment-the Tragedy paper.  All seniors must write one, and the English teacher who assigns it is portrayed as kindly, if more than a little eccentric.  We enter at the beginning of Duncan’s senior year, learning through him  the traditions of the Irving School, one of which is that seniors are bequeathed their rooms in the dorm by the previous class members.  Duncan gets his room from a student named Tim MacBeth.  (Yes, there are multiple allusions to tragic novels and plays throughout the book, especially The Sorrows of Young Werther, which I can appreciate, but suspect that any students other than the prep school types the book is about would miss.)  Duncan receives his “treasure,” a stack of CDs from Tim which tell his own, you guessed it, tragic story, in his very own voice (literally).  Tim is an albino, and has always been an outsider.  He comes to the Irving School as a senior, in an attempt to have a better year than any he has previously had in school.  Leaving aside the constant mentions of items like the dining hall serving only local sustainable food, and obscure boarding school traditions, Tim’s story is compelling, Duncan’s less so.  Duncan suffers through the usual teen romance, but Tim experiences a tragedy of  his own making, and the reader is assured by the  less than subtle hints of the author, that it is due to his fatal flaw.  I will leave it to you to discover what that flaw is.  Not bad for a first novel, this will appeal to students who enjoy an angsty romance or boarding school mishaps.  Much less affecting than Looking for Alaska, but also less possibly objectionable material. 
June Cleaver’s Ratings:  Language: PG; Nudity: PG13; Sexual Content: PG13; GLBT Content: G; Violence: PG13; Substance Use and Abuse:  PG13--some scenes involve underage drinking and there is a female student who overdoses on her mother’s Xanax, but she recovers.  Overall:  PG13
Robin’s Comments:  Booklist puts this book at 7-12 and SLJ at 9-12.  I would not recommend it to students under 8th grade due to some mature themes and the fact that the references to literary works are all high school texts, most middle school students will not get it. It is mostly fluff, but at least the writing is interesting and there are always games the reader can play, like how many tragic allusions can I find in this book?