November approaches and with it, NaNoWriMo–National Novel Writing Month. This year I have an idea for a middle-grade fantasy about a special boarding school. There are plenty of stories about magic boarding schools, but what if you’re a kid who can’t do magic in a world where almost everyone else can?

So far I’ve found one book about a non-magic school in a magical world. In Ordinary Magic, by Caitlen Rubino-Bradway, our protagonist is just getting ready to celebrate her twelfth birthday and her magical coming-of-age. After being evaluated for her level of magic, she can finally begin her magical education. Except… turns out she doesn’t have any magic. At all.

As a side note, have you noticed how many books start off with a testing or sorting of the main characters? From Harry Potter to Divergent, we can’t seem to get enough of putting people into groups. In our real lives, we have the much less exciting end-of-grade tests, SATs, and maybe some career counseling assessments. I think we are really fascinated by tests, especially those that could change the direction of our lives.

Going back to Ordinary Magic, I’m not going to say much about the story itself, except that the non-magic kids in Rubino-Bradway’s world face a much tougher time than I’m planning for mine. It’s a good book, and a nice twist on the magic boarding school idea.

So far, that’s the only book I’ve found about a boarding school for non-magic kids in a mostly magic world. By comparison, there are tons of books about magic boarding schools. I’m just going to mention one I read recently: A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. It’s unlike most of the other magic boarding school books I’ve read in that there don’t seem to be any teachers, at least not any human ones. So all the characters are students, and they have to be very independent and resourceful in order to survive their school days.

Literally. The title says it all. This school has a very high fatality rate. And yet, despite the wide range of magical nasties they have to contend with, whether gloppy, spikey, tentacle-y, or toothy, the tone of the book was pleasantly wry and gently humorous. I don’t like horror as a rule, and while this book has a few gruesome moments, I didn’t find it grim. And I really liked the main character.

On to the more general question–why do we like books about boarding schools? One obvious answer is that it gets the parents out of the story. They aren’t there to protect their kids, keep them from doing reckless things, or interfere with their social lives. Kids in a fictional boarding school get to be independent to a much greater extent than most real kids get to be be, and this allows for some grand adventures.

(Parents in these stories don’t get to hover over their kids to get them to do their homework, either. The kids do it themselves or suffer the consequences. Parents, take note.)

The second appealing thing about these books is that school is a very familiar setting for kids, but at the same time, homework, teachers, and tests can be interestingly different in a magical world. Consider magical duels. How often do you get to face your classmates in combat as part of school? Spelling bees just aren’t the same thing.

Finally, the setting allows for kids to have adventures at all hours of the day. A boarding school encompasses a lot of different settings within it–the dorms, the classrooms, the dining hall, the library, some sort of outdoor area–and these are all accessible (more or less) all the time. The story doesn’t have to take a break while students go home to eat dinner and sleep. Instead, students can sneak out of bed and explore hidden passageways down in the kitchens or hold secret meetings with friends in the girls’ or boys’ bathroom.

The more I think about it, the more I’m looking forward to trying my hand at a (non) magic boarding school book. Only a month to go!