"An Education In Ruin"

Chico novelist Alexis Bass (alexisbassbooks.com) exposes scandalous family secrets in "An Education In Ruin" ($19.99 in hardcover from Tor Teen; also for Amazon Kindle). 

The Rutherford Institute welcomes high schoolers from the moneyed class, those "with bright futures and lush lives." But for new third-year student Collins Pruitt, who tells the story, her arrival at the boarding school is the start of a mission having little to do with learning.

She focuses on the Mahoney boys, Theo and Jasper. Especially Jasper. He's a fourth-year, the school's lacrosse champion, "accepted early to Dartmouth after being lauded into academic stardom last year when he won the national academic decathlon. ... He spent last summer interning at Robames Inc., a world-popular company because their founder is a twenty-year-old Yale dropout and a Rutherford graduate herself."

If Collins can get Jasper to fall in love with her (and she is convinced by her aunt Rosie that she can), Collins can leverage the relationship to force his married mother, Marilyn, who dotes on her sons, to stop her affair with Collins' divorced father, Jacob, on whom she dotes. Simple.

Except not so simple. As the deliciously dishy tale unfolds, it turns out no one is who they seem to be. Take Rob (Roberta) James, head of Robames, plagued by a personal lawsuit that threatens to bring down the company. She's invented a medical device that quickly analyzes DNA (or something), but she's a total fraud. (The parallels with Elizabeth Holmes' Theranos are quite clear.) 

Jasper knows yet refuses to blow the whistle on Rob. Why? Collins is falling in love with him and in searching for the answers with her group of friends, Anastasia, Stewart, Sebastian, and, yes, Theo and Jasper, secrets inside secrets are revealed. Can love flourish when all the truths come out? 

In the end, Collins writes, "there are some things that are too complicated to understand unless you know the whole of it. The entirety. What came before what comes comes after. The broken-down parts, each piece making both the foundation and the destruction. A moment-by-moment recount until the abhorrent conclusion."

Readers may be so engrossed in "Ruin" it will ruin their dinner plans.