At Briarwood School for Girls

[Knight] is particularly adroit with the haunting clarity that follows some act or occurrence that forces a reckoning with the simultaneous complexity and triviality of human experience. The influence of Walker Percy hovers, fittingly, like a benevolent ghost over Knight’s elegant sentences, his unsentimental but broadly sympathetic rendering of the genteel South and his gift for seeing the spiritual dimension underlying what Percy calls 'everydayness.' At Briarwood School for Girls also echoes with the voice of Muriel Spark, whose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie will forever remain the girls-school novel against which all others are measured ... Knight borrows capably from the lore of this odd chapter of Virginia history, making it a resonant metaphor for the lessons of the past ... Knight manages somehow to employ a number of tropes—coming of age, the conflict between progress and preservation, the tricky politics of private schools and the yearnings of midlife—while nimbly shunning their familiar conventions, making them altogether his own. The result is a deep, luminous work of art, as pleasing as it is, yes, haunting.

...Michael Knight has cultivated an acute sensitivity to the sensation of haunting. He is particularly adroit with the haunting clarity that follows some act or occurrence that forces a reckoning with the simultaneous complexity and triviality of human experience. The influence of Walker Percy hovers, fittingly, like a benevolent ghost over Knight’s elegant sentences, his unsentimental but broadly sympathetic rendering of the genteel South and his gift for seeing the spiritual dimension underlying what Percy calls 'everydayness' ... Knight borrows capably from the lore of [an] odd chapter of Virginia history, making it a resonant metaphor for the lessons of the past ... Knight deftly ties the disparate threads of individual and community experience together in the novel’s denouement ... Knight manages somehow to employ a number of tropes—coming of age, the conflict between progress and preservation, the tricky politics of private schools and the yearnings of midlife—while nimbly shunning their familiar conventions, making them altogether his own. The result is a deep, luminous work of art, as pleasing as it is—yes—haunting.

Knight doesn’t use all those tightly corralled, hormonal bodies to stir up narrative tension. Instead, Briarwood is low-key, even placid; it floats from event to event without ever raising its pulse ... Knight unfortunately diverts our attention with two in loco parentis adults ... Both are given plenty of space for their own musings and worries, but their presence smothers the story’s low-burning flame. A bildungsroman — even a spare one — needs to give its heroine a wide berth so readers can watch her unfold ... In a small novel packed with side plots, I was greedy for more of Lenore and Eugenia.