Day #35 of the 50 Day Book Challenge..

[shadowkat]

I'm behind, I know.

The prompt is.. A book set in high school

Because I despised high school, I tended to avoid books set there.

However, I was forced to read a few here and there for school.

Vision Quest by Terry Davies it was assigned for everyone to read in one of our classes in high school or junior high - can't remember.

I only remember the book because I saw the movie soon after. The book is better.

Vision Quest is a young adult novel by Terry Davis, published in 1979.[1] In first-person, present-tense narrative, it tells the story of a few months in the life of Louden Swain, a high school wrestler in Spokane, Washington who is cutting weight and working toward the state championships. The book takes its title from the vision quest ritual of some Native American Indian tribes, of going into the wilderness alone to 'discover who you are and who your people are and how you fit into the circle of birth and growth and death and rebirth.'[2] John Irving called it "the truest novel about growing up since The Catcher in the Rye."[3]

Vision Quest was made into a 1985 movie of the same title, starring Matthew Modine and Linda Fiorentino, with a cameo appearance from Madonna as a night-club singer.

Mathew Modine was kind of miscast, I'd have cast Lou Diamond Phillips. And they kind of dropped the vision quest elements.

Here's the review by Siskel and Ebert of the movie, which again isn't like the book at all.

Watch on YouTube

My favorite book that takes place in a high school is a weird dystopian one..that few have heard of..

The Girl Who Owned a City - the city in the title is the local high school.

Comments

[mefisto]

Sadly, there's no book version of BtVS. Though I personally like the post-high school years better.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh that's interesting. I don't think I ever watched Vision Quest but I do remember it. I didn't realize it was a book first, nor that it was so lauded.

And they kind of dropped the vision quest elements.

Typical Hollywood.

[jesuswasbatman]

Isn't The Girl Who Owned a City a right-libertarian Randist tract?

[wendelah1]

I read "The Girl Who Owned a City" for a gift fic exchange. It was quite good, though I didn't end up writing for it.

The last book that I read that was set in high school is Agent of Chaos, by Kami Garcia. It's an X-Files novel, and was much better than I expected.

"How did Fox Mulder become a believer? How did Dana Scully become a skeptic? The X-Files Origins has the answers.

The X-Files Origins: Agent of Chaos explores the teen years of Fox Mulder, the beloved character depicted in the cult-favorite TV show The X-Files. His story is set in the spring of 1979, when serial murder, the occult, and government conspiracy were highlighted in the news.

The book will follow Mulder as he experiences life-changing events that set him on the path to becoming an FBI agent."