2.5 stars

What started as promising, unfortunately got bogged down. However it was still enjoyable.

Miriam Parker’s sophomore novel is set at a boarding school in Napa Valley. I know very little about boarding schools but it did remind me of college life, just with younger girls. Gillian has been a publicist to the stars but when a scandal forces her to leave her profession behind for good, she takes an opportunity to return to her alma mater and hide from the social media haters.

Gillian becomes a dorm mother at the boarding school she graduated from. She wasn’t like most of the girls who attended there. She had a single mom and was a scholarship student. But, she appreciated all the opportunities given to her while she was a student even though there was that one legendary prank during her senior year.

There is a lot of predictability in this story and very little plot, but the characters are mostly enjoyable. Gillian quickly becomes respected by the girls in her dorm and I found that a bit easy. As someone who works with high school students and the mother of a senior, I feel like kids are a bit warier. I was surprised that a prestigious school didn’t have more checks in place and a communication team to handle their own scandal that comes to light. Thankfully, Gillian is there to save the day….again, predictability.

“Maybe not all dreams are supposed to come true.”

“Maybe Lila was right: maybe this love was outdated, was based more on a romanticized version of the past than of the present.”

The characters were well-developed and the beauty of the campus was easy to imagine. Gillian relives some of her own high school dreams while being back on campus and part of me wishes she hadn’t. I felt like it wasn’t the right move for the character and made me cringe a few times. Even though I disagreed with some of the storylines, this was the right book at the right time for me. The lighter plot and enjoyable characters kept me reading and reliving my own high school and college days.

When Gillian"s life in NYC changes, she moves on to be a dorm mother in a CA high school. She was once a scholarship student at this school and is less than eager to take this last chance job. Gillian comes across as someone still stuck in high school with all of it's drama. I was disappointed in the story but finished it. There is some redemption later on, but still too much high school drama.

After seeing very poor reviews of this one, I decided to skip it. Maybe I'll come back to it but for now I have decided to skip it.

From the second I read the description of this one, I was IN. I mean, I’m obsessed with a good campus novel, and this one was giving shades of PREP. After a scandal, Gillian leaves her PR gig in Manhattan and travels back to the boarding school she attended in Sonoma, CA to become the house mother in the dorms. While there, she begins to find her footing as a mentor for the girls she’s in charge of and even falls for her high school crush who just so happens to be the father of one of her students. This was a really quick and easy read, but it wasn’t as campus novel-y as I was expecting. I think I would have enjoyed this much more if I hadn’t been so interested in it for its campus qualities, but that aspect left me a little disappointed. This was entertaining, but I thought the characters’ actions felt a little too outlandish and unrealistic at times. Not my fave, but not a bad way to fill a weekend!

I grew up in Napa so the Sonoma area is very familiar to me and all the surrounding areas. Loved the mention of smell of the grapes and cows. The smell of grapes I could even smell in the air when I was training at the Napa airport.

I enjoyed this second chance story as Gillians job implodes in NY and she gets a job as a dorm mom at her old boarding school. With it comes memories, new friends, old friends, old flames, and having to find her place in her new life.


Thank you penguinrandomhouse and netgalley for the e-ARC for my honest and voluntary review.

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Gillian, a former successful publicist, is leaving New York following a scandal that torpedoed her career. She has taken a job as a "dorm mom" at the exclusive high school she herself attended two decades prior, a poor scholarship student amidst a very wealthy cohort. Living on site at the Glen Ellen Academy, Gillian has a chance to recover from the recent scandal but, at the same time, she has to face up to unexamined trauma from her high school years, all while guiding young girls through their challenging teenage years.

I requested this book because I was interested in looking at celebrity scandal from the publicist's perspective as the person who did not commit an egregious crime but must deal with its consequences. However, only very minor attention is paid to the scandal - it is something that moves the plot along instead of being the central focus of the novel. Instead, the book is really about Gillian's time at the Academy and how she deals with her past while building a happy future for herself. It was fine, just not what I expected. Three stars.

I was looking forward to this book but it was just okay. I liked the setting of a private high school dorm. When Gillian’s career as a public relations specialist implodes, Gillian goes back to her old school as a dorm mom. Her three favorite students, Bunny, Julia and Rainbow are not especially interesting. As far as second chances go, Gillian lucks out but I would have preferred her remaining relationship free. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

Room and Board started out good and most of the story was good. There were some parts that were strange.

Gillian was a celebrity publicist in New York. Upon finding out that she sided with someone who lied to cover himself during the #MeToo movement, Gillian left her job. At just the right time, she gets an offer from her old boarding school in California to spend a year as a dorm mom, and takes it. Nervous about being back at the school where her reputation was first tarnished, she jumps head first into being a dorm mom as well as reconnecting with an old crush.

I liked the description of it and was instantly drawn in. I read the book in two days as I was eager to find out what happened to Gillian. For there being a bunch of teenagers, there wasn't as much drama as I was expecting. Some of Gillian's decisions were strange as well. Why trust the person that sided with everyone in your senior year of high school? She trusted him even after he did something that would have made others not get back together. I can understand getting to know someone to trust them again, but when they show you the same behavior as before, why continue that relationship?

ARC provided by NetGalley for an honest review.

After her career as a NYC publicist tanks, Gillian returns to the only place that will take her in (without a background check or references, apparently): to the alma mater where she was a scholarship kid, to be a dorm mom at the exclusive Glen Ellen Academy. This seems an unlikely escape after a scandalous downfall, to be a role model for entitled girls.

The super cool privileged set finds her a warm and willing mentor, which feels a bit disjointed, and her PR chops come in handy for a talented sibling duo whose mama wants them to make it big, and she saves the day when a scandal hits the school.

On the side, a self-confessed non-reader in high school, Gillian now reads widely, especially classics, and is trying to make a name for herself on book instagram... but complains about the old books in the school's library. (Have I mentioned I'm a librarian and sensitive to this stuff?)

One of the parents of her current charges becomes her love interest: Aiden, who owns a local winery and smells like... dirt. Gillian constantly chooses pursuing Aiden over her actual job duties. Weak character development and inconsistencies, and an over-reliance on brand name celebrity dropping made this Gossip Girls meets the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie a failure for me.

I received a free advance reader's review copy of #RoomAndBoard from #NetGalley

This took me FOREVER to read. I just couldn't get into it, but I kept trudging along. It wasn't bad per se but it wasn't engaging either. There really was no point to this book.

I'm all in books set in boarding schools so I was looking forward to Room and Board, but I really struggled with this one. It was just too unbelievable for me. I didn't really care about the characters and everything seemed so surface level.

I love boarding school settings, so when I saw Room and Board was the story of a woman who has been going through a bit of a tough time returning to her former boarding school as a house mom, I jumped at the chance to read it. There are few books out there that showcase the boarding school environment from a teacher/adult perspective, so that seemed fresh to me. The fact that this was presented as a bit of a second chance story, made it even better for me.

However, as I was reading, I found it difficult to connect with Gillian, our main character. She comes across as rather stuck-up and pretentious. At the same time she seems stuck in the past (high school) more than she should have been at her age (late thirties). Honestly, I struggled through this one. The writing was simplistic and became repetitive quickly. I am not even going to touch on the love interest in this story (perhaps the book and Gillian would have been easier to handle without it). Altogether, meh.

Room and Board by Miriam Parker is a book I really wanted to love due to the location, Glen Ellen, California. The story is of Gillian Brodie, a New York publicist that hit a very rough patch and had to leave her company and ends up as the 'dorm mom' at the boarding school she attended years ago. While it was fun with the descriptions of the setting and I found the book to be entertaining, I never fully connected with Gillian and did not care for way the book ended.

I just couldn't get into this book. I liked the narrative voice and usually I enjoy boarding school novels. Somehow, though, I didn't feel compelled by the plot enough to keep reading. My attention wandered to other books on my TBR and I never felt drawn back to find out what happened in this one. Maybe it was the right book at the wrong time. I may try again in the future.

My thanks to NetGalley and Dutton Books for an e-ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I was honestly a little skeptical of reading this book after seeing that the average star rating on Goodreads was well under 3 stars. After reading it however, I found it to be a solid 3 star read. Gillian is a bit pretentious and doesn't seem to know what she wants out of life. Most of the time this was fine, but overall I felt like it held her back from connecting with people and making real growth. I feel like the only growth we saw was her buying a car, indicating she was staying in California. I hated the love interest and despised that they ended up together. He isn't likable at all and I truly don't understand why she would pick him in the end. Especially after her conversation with her friend.
I think in general, this book would've done much better if Gillian had been 28 as opposed to 38. Not only would it have made the teens a little younger (maybe more like 13 or 14), but it would've made a lot of Gillian's actions a lot more understandable. She was still so obsessed with what happened in high school as well as her high school crush. I don't know many people who are in their later 30s who are still looking back that far with that much yearning. Also, it would've helped to make the amount that the girls looked up to and depended on Gillian make more sense. I felt like they were the least developed of the characters throughout the book and their personalities changed depending on what the author needed to move the book along. They definitely didn't read like real teenagers and it makes me question whether or not the author has spoken to a real teen in the last 10 years.
Overall, there were some cute aspects of the book but I found a lot of it to be repetitive and droll. There was a lot going on and it might've helped to scale that back. I also didn't feel like Gillian grew at all throughout the book. She fell back into being a publicist (although for a school rather than celebrities so... yay?) because she was good at it. Not even because she loved it. She even specifically says "I love being good at my job." So that felt a little disappointing. We also never saw her growth with her mom, nor her terrible friend from high school. Her coworker/friend felt like she was going to back stab her the entire book and for whatever reason a 60 something year old woman decides to confide the biggest scandal of all time in her?
Anyway, not my favorite book but not nearly as annoying or problematic as a bunch of the Goodreads reviews are saying.

Did not finish. The first few chapters were hard to get through & didn’t capture my attention enough to want to finish. Went to the reviews & starred rating to help me decide but it swayed me not to finish.

This book had a 2.88 rating in Goodreads. As I was reading, I thought it wasn't that bad... until it was.

The writing is very rudimentary and at times extremely repetitive. Gillian is an extremely immature character for someone that had a high level job that she excelled out. Finally, it's almost like the author forgot that the plot should have some sort of direction until halfway through the book. Then it was crammed in. This really is a ⭐️⭐️💫 read.

This book was just meh. It felt like one of those books where the protagonist goes back to her alma mater to relieve her glory days after a major fall from grace. Oh wait, it is one of those books. It just seemed unrealistic that this strong female character has a run of bad luck and returns to her boarding school to mentor the poor little rich girls. Boring