Shadow Academy: Pre-Reading

So, for this week I've been reading (or in one case re-reading) several books at once to kind of get a feel for how I want to lean into the Hogwarts-But-For-Monsters project. Basically, I've also been poking at some other series that seem to be off in the same direction to see how they handle their initial setup and introductions, and what might work for me. So, here's what I'm looking at: 

A Living Nightmare (Cirque Du Freak): I thought I'd take a dive into this one since it seemed to have monsters, and school-aged-children becoming monsters, and that's sort of the direction I'm headed. It's... not what I thought it might be, and (at about one third of the way through it) I'm not entirely sure I know where it's going, though of course I have my suspicions. It's taking a long, slow, horror-story buildup which is interesting in its own way, but definitely not what I want to do. Our narrator and his three friends are in high school when a mysterious freakshow comes into town, and two of them manage to sneak away and watch the show, where the acts become stranger and more terrifying by ominous degrees...

Vampire Academy:  Right, a school for vampires, definitely worth looking at to make sure I'm not about to retread well-worn ground. Only this one starts in media res, with the narrator realizing that her roommate is having a nightmare, shaking her awake, and letting the roommate -- a vampire -- feed on her, since the narrator is a half-vampire herself. The dhampir (half-vampire) realizes someone was watching through the window from outside and saw them, so as the vampire's protector she immediately evacuates them both. This is all basically the first scene of the book; my Kindle says I'm 3% of way through. So, my first reactions were, Wow, that got moving quickly, and Wow, that was amazingly sapphic and do they even realize that they're girlfriends? But this is opening with an established relationship between the two characters and with both them apparently comfortable in their roles as supernatural beings, which is definitely not what I'm looking for. I want to read on a bit further and see what they do with the eponymous Vampire Academy itself, but as far as the opening goes there's no resemblance to what I have in mind.

The Burning Sky (The Elemental Trilogy): I'd never heard of this one until somebody mentioned it on Twitter, and having read the whole trilogy I'm frankly amazed that it isn't wildly more popular. It's not as comparable to the Harry Potter books as that initial mention led me to believe, but it does feature young wizards fighting an evil overlord and his armies, and of course there's romance as well. There is actually a college involved, though it isn't a college of wizardry; it's Eton College, in 1883, which serves as a sort of backdrop and contrast to all the magical scheming going on. And it opens with both of its main characters already well-established as wizards; their education is as much learning about the true nature of their enemy as it about learning magic. So, much as I loved these books, they weren't particularly relevant to what I'm doing here. (I mention them primarily because I firmly believe that more people should read them. Seriously, go download a sample. Go!)

The Lightning Thief: It's been a while since I read this one, so I'm less clear on its details. I think I remember the general shape of it, though: ordinary young man, raised by a single mom and now at boarding school, discovers that he's far less ordinary than he believed when his teacher turns into a monster and attacks him and his best friend turns out to be a satyr. He arrives at Camp Half-Blood, where the half-human children of the gods are gathered for learning and protection, and begins to learn about his powers. Much as I liked this, there are definitely things I'm doing differently. For one thing, I want a somewhat older main character; for another thing, the gods in Percy Jackson and the Olympians are all these sort of horrible, absentee parents. And I don't want one super-powerful parent, either; I think it might make a nice change to have a young hero who comes from a stable, loving family with fairly ordinary, human parents.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: This, of course, is the main thing I'm looking at, since it's easily the most popular and best known Wizarding School book series in recent memory. It's also, in its way, the weirdest of the lot: it doesn't even start by introducing its main character. In fact, it starts by introducing the Dursleys -- the aggressively ordinary and respectable parents who will go on abuse Harry for the first ten years of his life -- and then Dumbledore and McGonagall, two wizards, who explain about the end of a terrible, hidden war among the wizards and the end of Voldemort. When the story finally does introduce Harry, it's as a baby in a basket. The whole first chapter is basically just a massive infodump/piece of foreshadowing, and it only works because it manages to be quirky and entertaining while the reader is trying to figure out where this is all going. (If the same background information had been given as a traditional preface, nobody in the world would have read more than halfway through.) 

Once the actual story gets going, it's essentially a Cinderella story: neglected young boy living a life of misery in an abusive household is saved when a messenger arrives to tell him that his parents were special, that he is special, and that he's needed in the wonderful, magical place where he truly belongs. He is taken to Diagon Alley and given his first taste of magic; then, a bit later and overcoming a few challenges in the process, he makes his way to Hogwarts to learn wizardry. Unlike Cinderella, being plucked away from his horrible life is only the beginning of the story, not the Happily Ever After; but the fairy tale setup is unmistakable. Annnnnd yeah, I don't really want to do that either. 

Okay, so what should be similar and what should be different? Well, for starters, their ages: Percy Jackson is twelve when he discovers Camp Half-Blood; Harry Potter is rescued from the Dursleys on his eleventh birthday. I want my protagonist, Darian Silver, to be old enough to make decisions for himself. And I've had enough of this selected-out-of-nowhere bit; he's applied to go to the Shadow Academy because for the last year strange things have been happening around him and it's making trouble for his family -- he's making trouble for his family. So he's decided to go somewhere that will be hopefully better equipped to deal whatever's going on with him. And his family isn't entirely happy about this, but they're prepared to respect his decision. 

And that's where I need to come in.