The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

Recommended by Sarah Braunstein, fiction instructor at Harvard Extension School; author of “The Sweet Relief of Missing Children”

The summer is coming. It’s time to leave the halls of learning for other places. But Muriel Spark, thankfully, invites us to linger. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” published in 1961, is a slim, hilarious, devastating novel. It offers a pitch-perfect depiction of the close-knit, all-seeing “Brodie girls” and their charismatic but flawed teacher. We are invited into their collective curiosity and longing. We share their losses. Spark gives access to the exhilarating (and fleeting) pleasures and pains of school — to the romance and danger of falling for your mentors. When one wishes be a student again (or finds oneself in the role of leader, eager faces peering up), this is the novel to open.