Academy Of Peculiars:Book 1 - Stranger by Isadora Brown

I am not sure what age range this book is aimed at but for me it is strictly pre-teen from the 1970s.  It seems a million miles away from anything that a teenager would want from their recreational reading in a modern world.  What's even worse is that the whole super-powers thing feels bolted on and not thought through at all; this is especially heinous because the whole premise of the title and the blurb make you think that it is going to be about this sub-X-Men school when really it is a thinly veiled romance story.

Then we get to our characters who are only interested in "copping off" with the opposite sex, I seem to recall a couple of vague references to same sex romantic relationships but they get quashed pretty quickly.  The height of the weekend for our three intrepid "heroines" appears to be sneaking out of school to go partying at a local nightclub that has a very lax alcohol policy.  How very 1980s of them.  I found it difficult to wrap my head around how they got away with this every single weekend when one of the powers that peculiars can have is an intimate knowledge of just what is going on in people's minds whether they wish them to or not. 

It all felt a little like "Wow, Hogwarts was a really successful franchise how can I develop a similar thing".  What you don't do is half bake it and this is more like quarter baked.  So, we have school houses split by the traditional four elements used in astrology - well I presume there's four we only get to meet two of them.  Could have worked but somehow really doesn't; maybe because the rivalry between fire and water is not explained you are just supposed to accept it.  Then you have the differentiation of the powers people can be born with and they all just feel made up on the fly and infinitely mutable as though the author felt some of them were a bit boring really so had to throw something new in to the mix at a minutes notice three quarters of the way through the book.

Then we get to find out that having these powers make you more or less immortal and somehow you stop ageing at a point in your early twenties.  What?  I can go with longevity being a nifty side effect of super strength or telekinesis but it is stretched to an nth degree here.  Even worse are the extremely inappropriate relationships between pupils and staff.  Honestly, it made my skin crawl.  I can understand schoolgirls getting crushes on teachers but the reciprocity of it was downright sickening (and not in a Queenly way).

Honestly, avoid, avoid, AVOID.  So many red flags in this book from not only dubious behavioural standpoints but the execution of it is lacklustre at best.