02383cam a2200373 i 4500 549637208 TxGeo 20220224120000.0 210325s2022||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2021013754 9781982170066 hbk. 1982170069 hbk. (OCoLC)1243909226 TxGeo rda Burton, Tara Isabella. The world cannot give / Tara Isabella Burton. World can't give. First Simon & Shuster hardcover edition. New York, NY : Simon & Schuster, 2022. 307 pages ; 24 cm. txt rdacontent n rdamedia nc rdacarrier "When the shy, sensitive Laura Stearns arrives at St. Dunstan's Academy in Maine, she dreams that life there will echo her favorite novel, All Before Them, the sole surviving piece of writing by Byronic "prep school prophet" (and St. Dunstan's alum) Sebastian Webster, who died at 19, fighting in the Spanish Civil War. She soon finds the intensity she is looking for among the insular, Webster-worshipping members of the school's cultic chapel choir: presided over by the charismatic, neurotic, overachiever Virginia Strauss, who is as fanatical about her newfound Christian faith as she is about the miles she runs every morning before dawn. Virginia inducts the besotted Laura into a world of transcendent music and arcane ritual, illicit cliff-diving and midnight crypt visits: a world that, like Webster's novels, finally seems to Laura to be full of meaning. But when a new, reformist school chaplain challenges Virginia's hold on the "family" she has created, and Virginia's efforts to hold onto her power become increasingly destructive, Laura must decide how far she will let her devotion to Virginia go. THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE is a meditation on the power, and danger, of wanting more than the world can give"-- Provided by publisher. 20220308. Choral societies Fiction. Choral music Fiction. Boarding schools Maine Fiction. Control (Psychology) Fiction. Bildungsromans. Psychological fiction. Thrillers (Fiction.) QS5