“He is mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” This quote opens Jeff Carney ’s debut YA novel, The Adventures of Michael MacInnes, and exemplifies the roguish attitude of the novel’s teen protagonist, a self-described poet trying to survive a stint at the all-male Stoney Batter boarding school.

When this rebel with a cause arrives at his proper prep school with a new roommate, Roger Legrande, at his side and the Jazz Age in full swing, excitement is bound to ensue. An orphaned scholarship student who positions himself as a champion of the underdog, Michael’s goal in life is to have his poems published. Living by his definition of poetry (“Poetry’s dangerous. It threatens the order of things. It questions authority.”), Michael’s lifestyle is one that the other boys at his elite school find unusual, and he stands out as a risk-taker who isn’t afraid to shake things up.

Filled with dark humor and over-the-top characters, The Adventures of Michael MacInnes is a thrill ride sure to intrigue teens who love an action-packed story and a hero who doesn’t back down from a challenge. VOYA recently declared this “a riveting debut novel.”

Jeff Carney is an English professor at Snow College and lives in Ephraim , Utah . At thirteen, he was sent to boarding school in Pennsylvania , an experience that inspired the setting for his first novel. He wrote about this time:

At thirteen, I was shipped off to the Mercersburg Academy , a boarding school in Pennsylvania , where I did well academically, made captain of the fencing team, and worked on the literary magazine. At the time, I wrote more poetry than fiction, but I was deeply affected by A Separate Peace and The Catcher in the Rye . For reasons I won’t even go into, I was expelled in my senior year. The experience threw me into a horrible depression, and I knew even then that if I ever wrote a novel, it would take place at a prep school.

Left with no diploma, I was rejected by every college I’d applied to. All but one, that is. Vassar College was open-minded enough not to care about silly things like credentials. So I went there. And I learned a lot about respecting people who were different from me. I also learned the value of free expression. I was an average student with, it seemed, a single talent: writing. I took every creative writing class that Vassar offered, placed stories in magazines, and was a popular addition to the student reading series.

After Vassar, to earn enough money for graduate school, I spent a year selling men’s clothing at a big-and-tall store. There is one simple rule to selling men’s suits: if you can get your customer to try on the pants, you’ve made the deal. I suspect the reason is dark and Freudian.

I earned an M.A. in creative writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago . At the time, it seemed like the right thing to do, but lately I wonder. There’s an awful lot of snobbery in writing programs, and when you ask most professors how to plot a story, they look as if you’ve asked directions to a brothel. I did learn a lot, though, even if I did have to figure out plotting on my own.

Jeff Carney will appear on Saturday, Oct. 28, 3:30 pm, in the Salt Lake City Main Library, 2nd Floor Canteena.